Castle of Wizardry

9

Once more Relg led them through the dark, silent world of the caves, and once more Garion hated every moment of it. It seemed an eternity ago that they had left Prolgu, where Ce’Nedra’s farewells to the frail old Gorim had been long and tearful. The princess rather balled Garion, and he gave himself over to some speculation about her as he stumbled along in the musty-smelling darkness. Something had happened at Prolgu. In some very subtle ways, Ce’Nedra was different—and the differences made Garion jumpy for some reason.

When at last, after uncountable days in the dark, twisting galleries, they emerged once again into the world of light and air, it was through an irregular, brush-choked opening in the wall of a steep ravine. It was snowing heavily outside with large flakes settling softly down through the windless air.

“Are you sure this is Sendaria?” Barak asked Relg as he bulled his way through the obstructing brush at the cave mouth.

Relg shrugged, once more binding a veil across his face to protect his eyes from the light. “We’re no longer in Ulgo.”

“There are a lot of places that aren’t in Ulgo, Relg,” Barak reminded him sourly.

“It sort of looks like Sendaria,” King Cho-Hag observed, leaning over in his saddle to stare out of the cave at the softly falling snow. “Can anybody make a guess at the time of day?”

“It’s really very hard to say when it’s snowing this hard, father,” Hettar told him. “The horses think it’s about noon, but their idea of time is a bit imprecise.”

“Wonderful,” Silk noted sardonically. “We don’t know where we are or what time it is. Things are getting off to a splendid start.”

“It’s not really that important, Silk,” Belgarath said wearily. “All we have to do is go north. We’re bound to run into the Great North Road eventually.”

“Fine,” Silk replied. “But which way is north?”

Garion looked closely at his grandfather as the old man squeezed out into the snowy ravine. The old man’s face was etched with lines of weariness, and the hollows under his eyes were dark again. Despite the two weeks or more of convalescence at the Stronghold and Aunt Pol’s considered opinion that he was fit to travel, Belgarath had obviously not yet fully recovered from his collapse.

As they emerged from the cave, they pulled on their heavy cloaks and tightened the cinches on their saddles in preparation to move out.

“Uninviting sort of place, isn’t it?” Ce’Nedra observed to Adara, looking around critically.

“This is mountain country,” Garion told her, quickly coming to the defense of his homeland. “It’s no worse than the mountains of eastern Tolnedra.”

“I didn’t say it was, Garion,” she replied in an infuriating way. They rode for several hours until they heard the sound of axes somewhere off in the forest. “Woodcutters,” Durnik surmised. “I’ll go talk with them and get directions.” He rode off in the direction of the sound. When he returned, he had a slightly disgusted look on his face. “We’ve been going south,” he told them.

“Naturally,” Silk said sardonically. “Did you find out what time it is?”

“Late afternoon,” Durnik told him. “The woodcutters say that if we turn west, we’ll strike a road that runs northwesterly. It will bring us to the Great North Road about twenty leagues on this side of Muros.”

“Let’s see if we can find this road before dark, then,” Belgarath said. It took them several days to ride down out of the mountains and several more before they had passed through the sparsely inhabited stretches of eastern Sendaria to the more thickly populated plains around Lake Sulturn. It snowed intermittently the entire time, and the heavily travelled roads of south-central Sendaria were slushy and lay like ugly brown scars across the snowy hills. Their party was large, and they usually had to split up among several inns in the neat, snow-covered villages at which they stopped. Princess Ce’Nedra quite frequently used the word “quaint” to describe both the villages and the accommodations, and Garion found her fondness for the word just a trifle offensive.

The kingdom through which they travelled was not the same Sendaria he had left more than a year before. Garion saw quiet evidence of mobilization in almost every village along the way. Groups of country militia drilled in the brown slush in village squares; old swords and bent pikes, long forgotten in dusty attics or damp cellars, had been located and scraped free of rust in preparation for the war everyone knew was coming. The efforts of these peaceful farmers and villagers to look warlike were often ludicrous. Their homemade uniforms were in every possible shade of red or blue or green, and their bright-colored banners obviously showed that treasured petticoats had been sacrificed to the cause. The faces of these simple folk, however, were serious. Though young men strutted in their uniforms for the benefit of village girls, and older men tried to look like veterans, the atmosphere in each village was grave. Sendaria stood quietly on the brink of war.

At Sulturn, Aunt Pol, who had been looking thoughtfully at each village through which they passed, apparently reached a decision. “Father,” she said to Belgarath as they rode into town, “you and Cho-Hag and the rest go straight on to Sendar. Durnik, Garion, and I need to make a little side trip.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Faldor’s farm.”

“Faldor’s? What for?”

“We all left things behind, father. You hustled us out of there so fast that we barely had time to pack.” Her tone and expression were so matter-of fact that Garion immediately suspected subterfuge, and Belgarath’s briefly raised eyebrow indicated that he also was fairly certain that she was not telling him everything.

“We’re starting to trim this a bit close, Pol,” the old man pointed out.

“There’s still plenty of time, father,” she replied. “It’s not really all that far out of our way. We’ll only be a few days behind you.”

“Is it really that important, Pol?”

“Yes, father. I think it is. Keep an eye on Errand for me, won’t you? I don’t think he really needs to go with us.”

“All right, Pol.”

A silvery peal of laughter burst from the lips of the Princess Ce’Nedra, who was watching the stumbling efforts of a group of militiamen to execute a right turn without tripping over their own weapons. Aunt Pol’s expression did not change as she turned her gaze on the giggling jewel of the Empire. “I think we’ll take that one with us, however,” she added.

Ce’Nedra protested bitterly when she was advised that she would not be travelling directly to the comforts of King Fulrach’s palace at Sendar, but her objections had no impact on Aunt Pol.

“Doesn’t she ever listen to anybody?” the little princess grumbled to Garion as they rode along behind Aunt Pol and Durnik on the road to Medalia.

“She always listens,” Garion replied.

“But she never changes her mind, does she?”

“Not very often—but she does listen.”

Aunt Pol glanced over her shoulder at them. “Pull up your hood, Ce’Nedra,” she instructed. “It’s starting to snow again, and I don’t want you riding with a wet head.”

The princess drew in a quick breath as if preparing to retort.

“I wouldn’t,” Garion advised her softly.

“But ”

“She’s not in the mood for discussion just now.”

Ce’Nedra glared at him, but pulled up her hood in silence.

It was still snowing lightly when they reached Medalia that evening. Ce’Nedra’s reaction to the lodgings offered at the inn was predictable. There was, Garion had noted, a certain natural rhythm to her outbursts. She never began at the top of her voice, but rather worked her way up to it with an impressively swelling crescendo. She had just reached the point of launching herself into full voice when she was suddenly brought up short.

“What an absolutely charming display of good breeding,” Aunt Pol observed calmly to Durnik. “All of Garion’s old friends will be terribly impressed by this sort of thing, don’t you think?”

Durnik looked away, hiding a smile. “I’m sure of it, Mistress Pol.”

Ce’Nedra’s mouth was still open, but her tirade had been cut off instantly. Garion was amazed at her sudden silence. “I was being a bit silly, wasn’t I?” she said after a moment. Her tone was reasonable almost sweet-natured.

“Yes, dear just a bit,” Aunt Pol agreed.

“Please forgive me—all of you.” Ce’Nedra’s voice dripped honey.

“Don’t overdo it, Ce’Nedra,” Aunt Pol told her.

It was perhaps noon of the following day when they turned off the main road leading to Erat into the country lane that led to Faldor’s farm. Since that morning, Garion’s excitement had risen to almost intolerable heights. Every milepost, every bush and tree was familiar to him now. And over there—wasn’t that old Cralto riding an unsaddled horse on some errand for Faldor? Finally, at the sight of a tall, familiar figure clearing brush and twigs from a drainage ditch, he was no longer able to restrain himself. He drove his heels into his horse’s flanks, smoothly jumped a fence and galloped across the snowy field toward the solitary worker.

“Rundorig!” he shouted, hauling his horse to a stop and flinging himself from his saddle.

“Your Honor?” Rundorig replied, blinking with astonishment.

“Rundorig, it’s me—Garion. Don’t you recognize me?”

“Garion?” Rundorig blinked several more times, peering intently into Garion’s face. The light dawned slowly in his eyes like a sunrise on a murky day. “Why, I believe you’re right,” he marvelled. “You are Garion, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am, Rundorig,” Garion exclaimed, reaching out to take his friend’s hand.

But Rundorig shoved both hands behind him and stepped back. “Your clothing, Garion! Have a care. I’m all over mud.”

“I don’t care about my clothes, Rundorig. You’re my friend.”

The tall lad shook his head stubbornly. “You mustn’t get mud on them. They’re too splendid. Plenty of time to shake hands after I clean up.” He stared curiously at Garion. “Where did you get such fine things? And a sword? You’d better not let Faldor see you wearing a sword. You know he doesn’t approve of that sort of thing.”

Somehow things were not going the way they were supposed to be going. “How’s Doroon?” Garion asked, “and Zubrette?”

“Doroon moved away last summer,” Rundorig replied after a moment’s struggle to remember. “I think his mother remarried—anyway, they’re on a farm down on the other side of Winold. And Zubrette well, Zubrette and I started walking out together not too long after you left.” The tall young man suddenly blushed and looked down in embarrassed confusion. “There’s a sort of an understanding between us, Garion,” he blurted.

“How splendid, Rundorig!” Garion explained quickly to cover the little dagger cut of disappointment.

Rundorig, however, had already taken the next step. “I know that you and she were always fond of each other,” he said, his long face miserably unhappy. “I’ll have a talk with her.” He looked up, tears standing in his eyes. “It wouldn’t have gone so far, Garion, except that none of us thought that you were ever coming back.”

“I haven’t really, Rundorig,” Garion quickly assured his friend. “We only came by to visit and to pick up some things we left behind. Then we’ll be off again.”

“Have you come for Zubrette, too?” Rundorig asked in a numb, stricken sort of voice that tore at Garion’s heart.

“Rundorig,” he said it very calmly, “I don’t even have a home any more. One night I sleep in a palace; the next night in the mud beside the road. Would either one of us want that kind of life for Zubrette?”

“I think she’d go with you if you asked her to, though,” Rundorig said. “I think she’d endure anything to be with you.”

“But we won’t let her, will we? So far as we’re concerned, the understanding between the two of you is official.”

“I could never lie to her, Garion,” the tall boy objected.

“I could,” Garion said bluntly. “Particularly if it will keep her from living out her life as a homeless vagabond. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking.” He grinned suddenly. “Just as in the old days.”

A slow smile crept shyly across Rundorig’s face.

The gate of the farm stood open, and good, honest Faldor, beaming and rubbing his hands with delight, was bustling around Aunt Pol, Durnik, and Ce’Nedra. The tall, thin farmer seemed as lean as always, and his long jaw appeared to have grown even longer in the year and more since they had left. There was a bit more gray at his temples, but his heart had not changed.

Princess Ce’Nedra stood demurely to one side of the little group, and Garion carefully scanned her face for danger signs. If anyone could disrupt the plan he had in mind, it would most likely be Ce’Nedra; but, try though he might, he could not read her face.

Then Zubrette descended the stairs from the gallery that encircled the interior of the courtyard. Her dress was a country dress, but her hair was still golden, and she was even more beautiful than before. A thousand memories flooded over Garion all at once, together with an actual pain at what he had to do. They had grown up together, and the ties between them were so deep that no outsider could ever fully understand what passed between them in a single glance. And it was with a glance that Garion lied to her. Zubrette’s eyes were filled with love, and her soft lips were slightly parted as if almost ready to answer the question she was sure he would ask, even before he gave it voice. Garion’s look, however, feigned friendship, affection even, but no love. Incredulity flickered across her face and then a slow flush. The pain Garion felt as he watched the hope die in her blue eyes was as sharp as a knife. Even worse, he was forced to retain his pose of indifference while she wistfully absorbed every feature of his face as if storing up those memories which would have to last her a lifetime. Then she turned and, pleading some errand, she walked away from them. Garion knew that she would avoid him thereafter and that he had seen her for the last time in his life.

It had been the right thing to do, but it had very nearly broken Garion’s heart. He exchanged a quick glance with Rundorig that said all that needed saying, then he sadly watched the departure of the girl he had always thought that one day he might marry. When she turned a corner and disappeared, he sighed rather bitterly, turned back and found Ce’Nedra’s eyes on him. Her look plainly told him that she understood precisely what he had just done and how much it had cost him. There was sympathy in that look—and a peculiar questioning.

Despite Faldor’s urgings, Polgara immediately rejected the role of honored guest. It was as if her fingers itched to touch all the familiar things in the kitchen once more. No sooner had she entered than her cloak went on a peg, an apron went about her waist, and her hands fell to work. Her polite suggestions remained so for almost a full minute and a half before they became commands, and then everything was back to normal again. Faldor and Durnik, their hands clasped behind their back, strolled about the courtyard, looking into storage sheds, talking about the weather and other matters, and Garion stood in the kitchen doorway with Princess Ce’Nedra.

“Will you show me the farm, Garion?” she asked very quietly.

“If you wish.”

“Does Lady Polgara really like to cook that much?” She looked across the warm kitchen to where Aunt Pol, humming happily to herself, was rolling out a pie crust.

“I believe she does,” Garion answered. “Her kitchen is an orderly kind of place, and she likes order. Food goes in one end and supper comes out the other.” He looked around at the low-beamed room with all the polished pots and pans hanging on the wall. His life seemed to have come full-circle. “I grew up in this room,” he said quietly.

“There are worse places to grow up, I suppose.”

Ce’Nedra’s tiny hand crept into his. There was a kind of tentativeness in her touch—almost as if she were not entirely certain how the gesture would be received. There was something peculiar and rather comforting about holding her hand. It was a very small hand; sometimes Garion found himself forgetting just how diminutive Ce’Nedra really was. At the moment she seemed very tiny and very vulnerable, and Garion felt protective for some reason. He wondered if it would be appropriate to put his arm about her shoulder.

Together they wandered about the farmstead, looking into barns and stables and hen roosts. Finally they reached the hayloft that had always been Garion’s favorite hiding place. “I used to come here when I knew that Aunt Pol had work for me to do,” he confessed with a rueful little laugh.

“Didn’t you want to work?” Ce’Nedra asked him. “Everybody here seems to be busy every single moment.”

“I don’t mind working,” Garion told her. “It’s just that some of the things she wanted me to do were pretty distasteful.”

“Like scrubbing pots?” she asked, her eyes twinkling.

“That’s not one of my favorites—no.”

They sat together on the soft, fragrant hay in the loft. Ce’Nedra, her fingers now locked firmly in Garion’s, absently traced designs on the back of his hand with her other forefinger. “You were very brave this afternoon, Garion,” she told him seriously.

“Brave?”

“You gave up something that’s always been very special and very important to you.”

“Oh,” he said. “You mean Zubrette. I think it was for the best, really. Rundorig loves her, and he can take care of her in ways that I probably won’t be able to.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Zubrette needs a lot of special attention. She’s clever and pretty, but she’s not really very brave. She used to run away from trouble a lot. She needs someone to watch over her and keep her warm and safe—somebody who can devote his entire life to her. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that.”

“If you’d stayed here at the farm, though, you’d have married her, wouldn’t you?”

“Probably,” he admitted, “but I didn’t stay at the farm.”

“Didn’t it hurt—giving her up like that?”

Garion sighed. “Yes,” he said, “it did, sort of, but it was best for all of us, I think. I get a feeling that I’m going to spend a lot of my life travelling about, and Zubrette’s really not the sort of person you can ask to sleep on the ground.”

“You people never hesitated to ask me to sleep on the ground,” Ce’Nedra pointed out a trifle indignantly.

Garion looked at her. “We didn’t, did we? I guess I never thought about that before. Maybe it’s because you’re braver.”

The following morning after extended farewells and many promises to return, the four of them set out for Sendar.

“Well, Garion?” Aunt Pol said as they rode across the hill that put Faldor’s farm irrevocably behind them.

“Well what?”

She gave him a long, silent look.

He sighed. There was really not much point in trying to hide things from her. “I won’t be able to go back there, will I?”

“No, dear.”

“I guess I always thought that when this was all finished, maybe we could go back to the farm—but we won’t, will we?”

“No, Garion, we won’t. You had to see it again to realize it, though. It was the only way to get rid of the little bits and pieces of it you’ve been trailing behind you all these months. I’m not saying that Faldor’s is a bad place, you understand. It’s just that it’s not right for certain people.”

“We make the trip all the way up there just so I could find that out?”

“It is fairly important, Garion—of course I enjoyed visiting with Faldor, too—and there were a few special things I left in the kitchen—things I’ve had for a very long time and that I’d rather not lose.”

A sudden thought had occurred to Garion, however. “What about Ce’Nedra? Why did you insist that she come along?”

Aunt Pol glanced back once at the little princess, who was riding some yards behind them with her eyes lost in thought. “It didn’t hurt her, and she saw some things there that were important for her to see.”

“I’m fairly sure that I’ll never understand that.”

“No, dear,” she agreed, “probably not.”

It snowed fitfully for the next day and a half as they rode along the road that crossed the white central plain toward the capital at Sendar. Though it was not particularly cold, the sky remained overcast and periodic flurries swept in on them as they rode west. Near the coastline, the wind picked up noticeably, and the occasional glimpses of the sea were disquieting. Great waves ran before the wind, their tops ripped to frothy tatters.

At King Fulrach’s palace, they found Belgarath in a foul humor. It was little more than a week until Erastide, and the old man stood glaring out a window at the stormy sea as if it were all some kind of vast, personal insult. “So nice you could join us,” he said sarcastically to Aunt Pol when she and Garion entered the room where he brooded.

“Be civil, father,” she replied calmly, removing her blue cloak and laying it across a chair.

“Do you see what it’s doing out there, Pol?” He jabbed an angry finger toward the window.

“Yes, father,” she said, not even looking. Instead, she peered intently at his face. “You aren’t getting enough rest,” she accused him.

“How can I rest with all that going on?” He waved at the window again.

“You’re just going to agitate yourself, father, and that’s bad for you. Try to keep your composure.”

“We have to be in Riva by Erastide, Pol.”

“Yes, father, I know. Have you been taking your tonic?”

“There’s just no talking with her.” The old man appealed directly to Garion. “You can see that, can’t you?”

“You don’t really expect me to answer a question like that, do you, Grandfather? Not right here in front of her?”

Belgarath scowled at him. “Turncoat,” he muttered spitefully.

The old man’s concern, however, was unfounded. Four days before Erastide, Captain Greldik’s familiar ship sailed into the harbor out of a seething sleet storm. Her masts and bulwarks were coated with ice, and her main sail was ripped down the center.

When the bearded sailor arrived at the palace, he was escorted to the room where Belgarath waited with Captain—now Colonel—Brendig; the sober baronet who had arrested them all in Camaar so many months before. Brendig’s rise had been very rapid, and he was now, along with the Earl of Seline, among King Fulrach’s most trusted advisors.

“Anheg sent me,” Greldik reported laconically to Belgarath. “He’s waiting at Riva with Rhodar and Brand. They were wondering what was keeping you.”

“I can’t find any ship captain willing to venture out of the harbor during this storm,” Belgarath replied angrily.

“Well, I’m here now,” Greldik told him. “I’ve got to patch my sail, but that won’t take too long. We can leave in the morning. Is there anything to drink around here?”

“How’s the weather out there?” Belgarath asked.

“A little choppy,” Greldik admitted with an indifferent shrug. He glanced through a window at the twelve-foot waves crashing green and foamy against the icy stone wharves in the harbor below. “Once you get out past the breakwater it isn’t too bad.”

“We’ll leave in the morning then,” Belgarath decided. “You’ll have twenty or so passengers. Have you got room?”

“We’ll make room,” Greldik said. “I hope you’re not planning to take horses this time. It took me a week to get my bilges clean after the last trip.”

“Just one,” Belgarath replied. “A colt that seems to have become attached to Garion. He won’t make that much mess. Do you need anything?”

“I could still use that drink,” Greldik replied hopefully.

The following morning the queen of Sendaria went into hysterics. When she learned that she was going to accompany the party to Riva, Queen Layla went all to pieces. King Fulrach’s plump little wife had an absolute horror of sea travel—even in the calmest weather. She could not so much as look at a ship without trembling. When Polgara informed her that she had to go with them to Riva, Queen Layla promptly collapsed.

“Everything will be all right, Layla,” Polgara kept repeating over and over again, trying to calm the agitated little queen. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“We’ll all drown like rats,” Queen Layla wailed in stark terror. “Like rats! Oh, my poor orphaned children.”

“Now stop that at once!” Polgara told her.

“The sea monsters will eat us all up,” the queen added morbidly, “crunching all our bones with their horrid teeth.”

“There aren’t any monsters in the Sea of the Winds, Layla,” Polgara said patiently. “We have to go. We must be in Riva on Erastide.”

“Couldn’t you tell them that I’m sick—that I’m dying?” Queen Layla pleaded. “If it would help, I will die. Honestly, Polgara, I’ll die right here and now on this very spot. Only, please, don’t make me get on that awful ship. Please.”

“You’re being silly, Layla,” Polgara chided her firmly. “You have no choice in the matter—none of us do. You and Fulrach and Seline and Brendig all have to go to Riva with the rest of us. That decision was made long before any of you were born. Now stop all this foolishness and start packing.”

“I can’t!” the queen sobbed, flinging herself into a chair.

Polgara looked at the panic-stricken queen with a kind of understanding sympathy, but when she spoke there was no trace of it in her voice. “Get up, Layla,” she commanded briskly. “Get on your feet and pack your clothes. You are going to Riva. You’ll go even if I have to drag you down to the ship and tie you to the mast until we get there.”

“You wouldn’t!” Queen Layla gasped, shocked out of her hysteria as instantly as if she had just been doused with a pail full of cold water. “You wouldn’t do that to me, Polgara.”

“Wouldn’t I?” Polgara replied. “I think you’d better start packing, Layla.”

The queen weakly struggled to her feet. “I’ll be seasick every inch of the way,” she promised.

“You can if it makes you happy, dear,” Polgara said sweetly, patting the plump little queen gently on the cheek.

10

They were two days at sea from Sendar to Riva, running before a quartering wind with their patched sail booming and the driving spray that froze to everything it touched. The cabin belowdecks was crowded, and Garion spent most of his time topside, trying to stay out of the wind and out from under the sailors’ feet at the same time. Inevitably, he moved finally to the sheltered spot in the prow, sat with his back against the bulwark and his blue hooded cloak tight about him, and gave himself over to some serious thinking. The ship rocked and pitched in the heavy swells and frequently slammed head-on into monstrous black waves, shooting spray in all directions. The sea around them was flecked with whitecaps, and the sky was a threatening, dirty gray.

Garion’s thoughts were almost as gloomy as the weather. His life for the past fifteen months had been so caught up in the pursuit of the Orb that he had not had time to look toward the future. Now the quest was almost over, and he began to wonder what would happen once the Orb had been restored to the Hall of the Rivan King. There would no longer be any reason for his companions to remain together. Barak would return to Val Alorn; Silk would certainly find some other part of the world more interesting; Hettar and Mandorallen and Relg would return home; and even Ce’Nedra, once she had gone through the ceremony of presenting herself in the throne room, would be called back to Tol Honeth. The adventure was almost over, and they would all pick up their lives again. They would promise to get together someday and probably be quite sincere about it; but Garion knew that once they parted, he would never see them all together again.

He wondered also about his own life. The visit to Faldor’s farm had forever closed that door to him, even if it had ever really been open. The bits and pieces of information he had been gathering for the past year and more told him quite plainly that he was not going to be in a position to make his own decisions for quite some time.

“I don’t suppose you’d consider telling me what I’m supposed to do next?” He didn’t really expect any kind of satisfactory answer from that other awareness.

“It’s a bit premature,” the dry voice in his mind replied.

“We’ll be in Riva tomorrow,” Garion pointed out. “As soon as we put the Orb back where it belongs, this part of the adventure will be all finished. Don’t you think that a hint or two might be in order along about now?”

“I wouldn’t want to spoil anything for you.”

“You know, sometimes I think you keep secrets just because you know that it irritates people.”

“What an interesting idea.”

The conversation got absolutely nowhere after that.

It was about noon on the day before Erastide when Greldik’s icecoated ship tacked heavily into the sheltered harbor of the city of Riva on the east coast of the Isle of the Winds. A jutting promentory of wind-lashed rock protected the harbor basin and the city itself. Riva, Garion saw immediately, was a fortress. The wharves were backed by a high, thick city wall, and the narrow, snow-choked gravel strand stretching out to either side of the wharves was also cut off from access to the city. A cluster of makeshift buildings and low, varicolored tents stood on the strand, huddled against the city wall and half buried in snow. Garion thought he recognized Tolnedrans and a few Drasnian merchants moving quickly through the little enclave in the raw wind.

The city itself rose sharply up the steep slope upon which it was built, each succeeding row of gray stone houses towering over the ones below. The windows facing out toward the harbor were all very narrow and very high up in the buildings, and Garion could see the tactical advantage of such construction. The terraced city was a series of successive barriers. Breaching the gates would accomplish virtually nothing. Each terrace would be as impregnable as the main wall. Surmounting the entire city and brooding down at it rose the final fortress, its towers and battlements as gray as everything else in the bleak city of the Rivans. The blue and white sword-banners of Riva stood out stiffly in the wind above the fortress, outlined sharply against the dark gray clouds scudding across the winter sky.

King Anheg of Cherek, clad in fur, and Brand, the Rivan Warder, wearing his gray cloak, stood on the wharf before the city gates waiting for them as Greldik’s sailors rowed the ship smartly up to the wharf. Beside them, his reddish-gold hair spread smoothly out over his greencloaked shoulders, stood Lelldorin of Wildantor. The young Asturian was grinning broadly. Garion took one incredulous look at his friend; then, with a shout of joy, he jumped to the top of the rail and leaped across to the stone wharf. He and Lelldorin caught each other in a rough bear hug, laughing and pounding each other on the shoulders with their fists.

“Are you all right?” Garion demanded. “I mean, did you completely recover and everything?”

“I’m as sound as ever,” Lelldorin assured him with a laugh. Garion looked at his friend’s face dubiously. “You’d say that even if you were bleeding to death, Lelldorin.”

“No, I’m really fine,” the Asturian protested. “The young sister of Baron Oltorain leeched the Algroth poison from my veins with poultices and vile-tasting potions and restored me to health with her art. She’s a marvellous girl.” His eyes glowed as he spoke of her.

“What are you doing here in Riva?” Garion demanded.

“Lady Polgara’s message reached me last week,” Lelldorin explained. “I was still at Baron Oltorain’s castle.” He coughed a bit uncomfortably. “For one reason or another, I had kept putting off my departure. Anyway, when her instruction to travel to Riva with all possible haste reached me, I left at once. Surely you knew about the message.”

“This is the first I’d heard of it,” Garion replied, looking over to where Aunt Pol, followed by Queen Silar and Queen Layla, was stepping down from the ship to the wharf.

“Where’s Rhodar?” Cho-Hag was asking King Anheg.

“He stayed up at the Citadel.” Anheg shrugged. “There isn’t really that much point to his hauling that paunch of his up and down the steps to the harbor any more than he has to.”

“How is he?” King Fulrach asked.

“I think he’s lost some weight,” Anheg replied. “The approach of fatherhood seems to have had some impact on his appetite.”

“When’s the child due?” Queen Layla asked curiously.

“I really couldn’t say, Layla,” the king of Cherek told her. “I have trouble keeping track of things like that. Porenn had to stay at Boktor, though. I guess she’s too far along to travel. Islena’s here though.”

“I need to talk with you, Garion,” Lelldorin said nervously.

“Of course.” Garion led his friend several yards down the snowy pier away from the turmoil of disembarking.

“I’m afraid that the Lady Polgara’s going to be cross with me, Garion,” Lelldorin said quietly.

“Why cross?” Garion said it suspiciously.

“Well—” Lelldorin hesitated. “A few things went wrong along the way-sort of.”

“What exactly are we talking about when we say ‘went wrong—sort of?’”

“I was at Baron Oltorain’s castle,” Lelldorin began.

“I got that part.”

“Ariana—the Lady Ariana, that is, Baron Oltorain’s sister—”

“The blond Mimbrate girl who nursed you back to health?”

“You remember her,” Lelldorin sounded very pleased about that. “Do you remember how lovely she is? How—”

“I think we’re getting away from the point, Lelldorin,” Garion said firmly. “We were talking about why Aunt Pol’s going to be cross with you.”

“I’m getting to it, Garion. Well-to put it briefly—Ariana and I had become—well—friends.”

“I see.”

“Nothing improper, you understand,” Lelldorin said quickly. “But our friendship was such that—well—we didn’t want to be separated.” The young Asturian’s face appealed to his friend for understanding. “Actually,” he went on, “it was a bit more than ‘didn’t want to.’ Ariana told me that she’d die if I left her behind.”

“Possibly she was exaggerating,” Garion suggested.

“How could I risk it, though?” Lelldorin protested. “Women are much more delicate than we are—besides, Ariana’s a physician. She’d know if she’d die, wouldn’t she?”

“I’m sure she would.” Garion sighed. “Why don’t you just plunge on with the story, Lelldorin? I think I’m ready for the worst now.”

“It’s not that I really meant any harm,” Lelldorin said plaintively.

“Of course not.”

“Anyway, Ariana and I left the castle very late one evening. I knew the knight on guard at the drawbridge, so I hit him over the head because I didn’t want to hurt him.”

Garion blinked.

“I knew that he’d be honor-bound to try to stop us,” Lelldorin explained. “I didn’t want to have to kill him, so I hit him over the head.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Garion said dubiously.

“Ariana’s almost positive that he won’t die.”

“Die?”

“I hit him just a little too hard, I think.”

The others had all disembarked and were preparing to follow Brand and King Anheg up the steep, snow-covered stairs toward the upper levels of the city.

“So that’s why you think Aunt Pol might be cross with you,” Garion said as he and Lelldorin fell in at the rear of the group.

“Well, that’s not exactly the whole story, Garion,” Lelldorin admitted. “A few other things happened, too.”

“Such as what?”

“Well—they chased us—a little—and I had to kill a few of their horses.”

“I see.”

“I specifically aimed my arrows at the horses and not at the men. It wasn’t my fault that Baron Oltorain couldn’t get his foot clear of the stirrup, was it?”

“How badly was he hurt?” Garion was almost resigned by now.

“Nothing serious at all—at least I don’t think so. A broken leg perhaps—the one he broke before when Sir Mandorallen unhorsed him.”

“Go on,” Garion told him.

“The priest did have it coming, though,” Lelldorin declared hotly.

“What priest?”

“The priest of Chaldan at that little chapel who wouldn’t marry us because Ariana couldn’t give him a document proving that she had her family’s consent. He was very insulting.”

“Did you break anything?”

“A few of his teeth is about all—and I stopped hitting him as soon as he agreed to perform the ceremony.”

“And so you’re married? Congratulations. I’m sure you’ll both be very happy just as soon as they let you out of prison.”

Lelldorin drew himself up. “It’s a marriage in name only, Garion. I would never take advantage of it—you know me better than that. We reasoned that Ariana’s reputation might suffer if it became known that we were travelling alone like that. The marriage was just for the sake of appearances.”

As Lelldorin described his disastrous journey through Arendia, Garion glanced curiously at the city of Riva. There was a kind of unrelieved bleakness about its snow-covered streets. The buildings were all very tall and were of a uniform gray color. The few evergreen boughs, wreaths, and brightly-hued buntings hung in celebration of the Erastide season seemed somehow to accentuate the stiff grimness of the city. There were, however, some very interesting smells coming from kitchens where Erastide feasts simmered and roasted under the watchful eyes of the women of Riva.

“That was all of it, then?” Garion asked his friend. “You stole Baron Oltorain’s sister, married her without his consent, broke his leg and assaulted several of his people—and a priest. That was everything that happened?”

“Well—not exactly.” Lelldorin’s face was a bit pained.

“There’s more?”

“I didn’t really mean to hurt Torasin.”

“Your cousin?”

Lelldorin nodded moodily. “Ariana and I took refuge at my Uncle Reldegin’s house, and Torasin made some remarks about Ariana—she is a Mimbrate after all, and Torasin’s very prejudiced. My remonstrances were quite temperate, I thought—all things considered—but after I knocked him down the stairs, nothing would satisfy him but a duel.”

“You killed him?” Garion asked in a shocked voice.

“Of course I didn’t kill him. All I did was run him through the leg—just a little bit.”

“How can you run somebody through just a little bit, Lelldorin?” Garion demanded of his friend in exasperation.

“You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you, Garion?” The young Asturian seemed almost on the verge of tears.

Garion rolled his eyes skyward and gave up. “No, Lelldorin, I’m not disappointed—a little startled perhaps—but not really disappointed. Was there anything else you can remember?—Anything you might have left out?”

“Well, I hear that I’ve sort of been declared an outlaw in Arendia.”

“Sort of?”

“The crown’s put a price on my head,” Lelldorin admitted, “or so I understand.”

Garion began to laugh helplessly.

“A true friend wouldn’t laugh at my misfortunes,” the young man complained, looking injured.

“You managed to get into that much trouble in just a week?”

“None of it was really my fault, Garion. Things just got out of hand, that’s all. Do you think Lady Polgara’s going to be angry?”

“I’ll talk to her,” Garion assured his impulsive young friend. “Maybe if she and Mandorallen appeal to King Korodullin, they can get him to take the price off your head.”

“Is it true that you and Sir Mandorallen destroyed the Murgo Nachak and all his henchmen in the throne room at Vo Mimbre?” Lelldorin asked suddenly.

“I think the story might have gotten a bit garbled,” Garion replied. “I denounced Nachak, and Mandorallen offered to fight him to prove that what I said was true. Nachak’s men attacked Mandorallen then, and Barak and Hettar joined in. Hettar’s the one who actually killed Nachak. We did manage to keep your name—and Torasin’s—out of it.”

“You’re a true friend, Garion.”

“Here?” Barak was saying. “What’s she doing here?”

“She came with Islena and me,” King Anheg replied.

“Did she—?”

Anheg nodded. “Your son’s with her—and your daughters. His birth seems to have mellowed her a bit.”

“What does he look like?” Barak asked eagerly.

“He’s a great, red-haired brute of a boy.” Anheg laughed. “And when he gets hungry, you can hear him yell for a mile.”

Barak grinned rather foolishly.

When they reached the top of the stairs and came out in the shallow square before the great hall, two rosy-cheeked little girls in green cloaks were waiting impatiently for them. They both had long, reddish-blond braids and seemed to be only slightly older than Errand. “Poppa,” the youngest of the two squealed, running to Barak. The huge man caught her up in his arms and kissed her soundly. The second girl, a year or so older than her sister, joined them with a show of dignity but was also swept up in her father’s embrace.

“My daughters,” Barak introduced the girls to the rest of the party. “This is Gundred.” He poked his great red beard into the face of the eldest girl, and she giggled as his whiskers tickled her face. “And this is little Terzie.” He smiled fondly at the youngest.

“We have a little brother, Poppa,” the elder girl informed him gravely.

“What an amazing thing,” Barak replied, feigning a great show of astonishment.

“You knew about it already!” Gundred accused him. “We wanted to be the ones to tell you.” She pouted.

“His name’s Unrak, and he’s got red hair just the same as you have,” Terzie announced, “but he doesn’t have a beard yet.”

“I expect that will come in time,” Barak assured her.

“He dells a lot,” Gundred reported, “and he hasn’t got any teeth.”

Then the broad gateway to the Rivan Citadel swung open and Queen Islena, wearing a dark red cloak, emerged from within, accompanied by a lovely blond Arendish girl and by Merel, Barak’s wife. Merel was dressed all in green and she was carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms. Her expression was one of pride.

“Hail Barak, Earl of Trellheim and husband,” she said with great formality. “Thus have I fulfilled my ultimate duty.” She extended the bundle. “Behold your son Unrak, Trellheim’s heir.”

With a strange expression, Barak gently set his daughters down, approached his wife, and took the bundle from her. Very gently, his great fingers trembling, he turned back the blanket to gaze for the first time at his son’s face. Garion could see only that the baby had bright red hair, much the same color as Barak’s.

“Hail, Unrak, heir to Trellheim and my son,” Barak greeted the infant in his rumbling voice. Then he kissed the child in his hands. The baby boy giggled and cooed as his father’s great beard tickled his face. His two tiny hands reached up and clutched at the beard, and he bur rowed his face into it like a puppy.

“He’s got a good strong grip,” Barak commented to his wife, wincing as the infant tugged at his beard.

Merel’s eyes seemed almost startled, and her expression was unreadable.

“This is my son Unrak,” Barak announced to the rest of them, holding the baby up so that they could see him. “It may be a bit early to tell, but he shows some promise.”

Barak’s wife had drawn herself up with pride. “I have done well then, my Lord?”

“Beyond all my expectations, Merel,” he told her. Then, holding the baby in one arm, he caught her in the other and kissed her exuberantly. She seemed even more startled than before.

“Let’s go inside,” the brutish-looking King Anheg suggested. “It’s very cold out here, and I’m a sentimental man. I’d rather not have tears freezing in my beard.”

The Arendish girl joined Lelldorin and Garion as they entered the fortress.

“And this is my Ariana,” Lelldorin told Garion with an expression of total adoration on his face.

For a moment—for just a moment—Garion had some hope for his impossible friend. Lady Ariana was a slim, practical-looking Mimbrate girl, whose medical studies had given her face a certain seriousness. The look she directed at Lelldorin, however, immediately dispelled any hope. Garion shuddered inwardly at the total lack of anything resembling reason in the gaze these two exchanged. Ariana would not restrain Lelldorin as he crashed headlong into disaster after disaster; she would encourage him; she would cheer him on.

“My Lord hath awaited thy coming most eagerly,” she said to Garion as they followed the others along a broad stone corridor. The very slight stress she put on “My Lord” indicated that while Lelldorin might think that their marriage was one in name only, she did not.

“We’re very good friends,” Garion told her. He looked around, a bit embarrassed by the way these two kept staring into each others’ eyes. “Is this the Hall of the Rivan King, then?” he asked.

“’Tis generally called so,” Ariana replied. “The Rivans themselves speak with more precision, however. Lord Olban, youngest son of the Rivan Warder, hath most graciously shown us throughout the fortress, and he doth speak of this as the Citadel. The Hall of the Rivan King is the throne room itself.”

“Ah,” Garion said, “I see.” He looked away quickly, not wanting to see the way all thought vanished from her eyes when they returned to their contemplation of Lelldorin’s face.

King Rhodar of Drasnia, wearing his customary red robe, was sitting in the large, low-beamed dining room where a fire crackled in a cavelike fireplace and a multitude of candles gave off a warm, golden light. Rhodar vastly filled a chair at the head of a long table with the ruins of his lunch spread before him. His crown was hung negligently on the back of his chair, and his round, red face was gleaming with perspiration. “Finally!” he said with a grunt. He waddled ponderously to greet them. He fondly embraced Polgara, kissed Queen Silar and Queen Layla, and took the hands of King Cho-Hag and King Fulrach in his own. “It’s been a long time,” he said to them. Then he turned to Belgarath. “What took you so long?” he asked.

“We had a long way to go, Rhodar,” the old sorcerer replied, pulling off his cloak and backing up to the broad-arched fireplace. “You don’t go from here to Rak Cthol in a week, you know.”

“I hear that you and Ctuchik finally had it out,” the king said.

Silk laughed sardonically. “It was a splendid little get-together, uncle.”

“I’m sorry I missed it.” King Rhodar looked inquiringly at Ce’Nedra and Adara, his expression openly admiring. “Ladies,” he said to them bowing politely, “if someone will introduce us, I’ll be more than happy to bestow a few royal kisses.”

“If Porenn catches you kissing pretty girls, she’ll carve out your tripes, Rhodar.” King Anheg laughed crudely.

As Aunt Pol made the introductions, Garion drew back a few paces to consider the havoc Lelldorin had caused in one short week. It was going to take months to unravel it, and there was no guarantee that it would not happen again—indeed, that it would not happen every time the young man got loose.

“What’s the matter with your friend?” It was the Princess Ce’Nedra, and she was tugging on Garion’s sleeve.

“What do you mean, what’s the matter with him?”

“You mean he’s always like that?”

“Lelldorin—” Garion hesitated. “Well, Lelldorin’s very enthusiastic about things, and sometimes he speaks or acts without stopping to think.” Loyalty made him want to put the best face on it.

“Garion.” Ce’Nedra’s gaze was very direct. “I know Arends, and he’s the most Arendish Arend I’ve ever met. He’s so Arendish that he’s almost incapacitated.”

Garion quickly came to the defense of his friend. “He’s not that bad.”

“Really? And Lady Ariana. She’s a lovely girl, a skilled physician and utterly devoid of anything remotely resembling thought.”

“They’re in love,” Garion said, as if that explained everything.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Love does things to people,” Garion told her. “It seems to knock holes in their judgment or something.”

“What a fascinating observation,” Ce’Nedra replied. “Do go on.”

Garion was too preoccupied with the problem to catch the dangerous lilt in her voice. “As soon as somebody falls in love, all the wits seem to dribble out of the bottom of his head,” he continued moodily.

“What a colorful way to put it,” Ce’Nedra said.

Garion even missed that warning. “It’s almost as if it were some kind of disease,” he added.

“Do you know something, Garion?” the princess said in a conversational, almost casual tone of voice. “Sometimes you make me positively sick.” And she turned and walked away, leaving him staring after her in open-mouthed astonishment.

“What did I say?” he called after her, but she ignored him.

After they had all dined, King Rhodar turned to Belgarath. “Do you suppose we might have a look at the Orb?” he asked.

“Tomorrow,” the old man answered. “We’ll reveal it when it’s returned to its proper place in the Hall of the Rivan King at midday.”

“We’ve all seen it before, Belgarath,” King Anheg asserted. “What’s the harm in our having a look now?”

Belgarath shook his head stubbornly. “There are reasons, Anheg,” he said. “I think it may surprise you tomorrow, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone.”

“Stop him, Durnik,” Polgara said as Errand slipped from his seat and walked around the table toward King Rhodar, his hand fumbling with the strings of the pouch at his waist.

“Oh no, little fellow,” Durnik said, catching the boy from behind and lifting him up into his arms.

“What a beautiful child,” Queen Islena observed. “Who is he?”

“That’s our thief,” Belgarath replied. “Zedar found him someplace and raised him as a total innocent. At the moment, he seems to be the only one in the world who can touch the Orb.”

“Is that it in the pouch?” Anheg asked.

Belgarath nodded. “He’s caused us all some anxiety along the way. He keeps trying to give it to people. If he decides to offer you something, I don’t really advise taking it.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Anheg agreed.

As was usually the case, once Errand’s attention had been diverted, he immediately seemed to forget about the Orb. His gaze focused on the infant Barak was holding; as soon as Durnik set him down, he went over to look at the baby. Unrak returned the look and some kind of peculiar recognition seemed to pass between them. Then Errand gently kissed the child in Barak’s arms, and Unrak, smiling, took hold of the strange little boy’s finger. Gundred and Terzie gathered close, and Barak’s great face rose from the garden of children clustered about him. Garion could clearly see the tears glistening in his friend’s eyes as he looked at his wife Merel. The look she returned him was strangely tender; for the first time Garion could remember, she smiled at her husband.

11

That night a sudden, savage storm howled down from the northwest to claw at the unyielding rock of the Isle of the Winds. Great waves crashed and thundered against the cliffs, and a shrieking gale howled among the ancient battlements of Iron-grip’s Citadel. The firm set rock of the fortress seemed almost to shudder as the seething storm lashed again and again at the walls.

Garion slept fitfully. There was not only the shriek and bellow of wind and the rattle of sleet against close-shuttered windows to contend with, nor the gusting drafts that blew suddenly down every corridor to set unlatched doors banging, but there were also those peculiar moments of oppressive silence that were almost as bad as the noise. Strange dreams stalked his sleep that night. Some great, momentous, and unexplained event was about to take place, and there were all manner of peculiar things that he had to do in preparation for it. He did not know why he had to do them, and no one would tell him if he were doing them right or not. There seemed to be some kind of dreadful hurry, and people kept rushing him from one thing to the next without ever giving him time to make sure that anything was really finished.

Even the storm seemed to be mixed up in it—like some howling enemy trying with noise and wind and crashing waves to break the absolute concentration necessary to complete each task.

“Are you ready?” It was Aunt Pol, and she was placing a longhandled kitchen kettle on his head like a helmet and handing him a pot-lid shield and a wooden stick sword.

“What am I supposed to do?” he demanded of her.

“You know,” she replied. “Hurry. It’s getting late.”

“No, Aunt Pol, I don’t—really.”

“Of course you do. Now stop wasting time.”

He looked around, feeling very confused and apprehensive. Not far away, Rundorig stood with that same rather foolish look on his face that had always been there. Rundorig also had a kettle on his head, a pot-lid shield, and a wooden sword. Apparently he and Rundorig were supposed to do this together. Garion smiled at his friend, and Rundorig grinned back.

“That’s right,” Aunt Pol said encouragingly. “Now kill him. Hurry, Garion. You have to be finished by suppertime.”

He spun around to stare at her. Kill Rundorig? But when he looked back, it was not Rundorig. Instead the face that looked at him from beneath the kettle was maimed and hideous.

“No, no,” Barak said impatiently. “Don’t hold it like that. Grip it in both hands and keep it pointed at his chest. Keep the point low so that, when he charges, he doesn’t knock the spear aside with his tusks. Now do it again. Try to get it right this time. Hurry, Garion. We don’t have all day, you know.” The big man nudged the dead boar with his foot, and the boar got up and began to paw at the snow. Barak gave Garion a quick look. “Are you ready?” he demanded.

Then he was standing on a strange, colorless plain, and there seemed to be statues all around him. No. Not statues—figures. King Anheg was there—or a figure that looked like him—and King Korodullin, and Queen Islena, and there was the Earl of Jarvik, and over there was Nachak, the Murgo ambassador at Vo Mimbre.

“Which piece do you want to move?” It was the dry voice in his mind.

“I don’t know the rules,” Garion objected.

“That doesn’t matter. You have to move. It’s your turn.”

When Garion turned back, one of the figures was rushing at him. It wore a cowled robe, and its eyes bulged with madness. Without thinking, Garion raised his hand to ward off the figure’s attack.

“Is that the move you want to make?” the voice asked him.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s too late to change it now. You’ve already touched him. From now on, you have to make your own moves.”

“Is that one of the rules?”

“That’s the way it is. Are you ready?”

There was the smell of loam and of ancient oak trees. “You really must learn to control your tongue, Polgara,” Asharak the Murgo said with a bland smile, slapping Aunt Pol sharply across the face.

“It’s your move again,” the dry voice said. “There’s only one that you can make.”

“Do I have to do it? Isn’t there anything else I can do?”

“It’s the only move there is. You’d better hurry.”

With a deep sigh of regret, Garion reached out and set fire to Asharak with the palm of his hand.

A sudden, gusting draft banged open the door of the room Garion shared with Lelldorin, and the two of them sat bolt upright in their beds.

“I’ll latch it again,” Lelldorin said, throwing back the covers and stumbling across the chilly stones of the floor.

“How longs it going to keep blowing like this?” Garion asked peevishly. “How’s anyone supposed to sleep with all this noise?”

Lelldorin closed the door again, and Garion heard him fumbling around in the darkness. There was a scraping click and a sudden bright spark. The spark went out, and Lelldorin tried again. This time it caught in the tinder. The young Asturian blew on it, and it grew brighter, then flared into a small finger of flame.

“Have you got any idea what time it is?” Garion asked as his friend lighted the candle.

“Some hours before dawn, I imagine,” Lelldorin replied.

Garion groaned. “It feels like this night’s already been about ten years long.”

“We can talk for a while,” Lelldorin suggested. “Maybe the storm will die down toward dawn.”

“Talking’s better than lying here in the dark, jumping at every sound,” Garion agreed, sitting up and pulling his blanket around his shoulders.

“Things have happened to you since we saw each other last, haven’t they, Garion?” Lelldorin asked, climbing back into his own bed.

“A lot of things,” Garion told him, “not all of them good, either.”

“You’ve changed a great deal,” Lelldorin noted.

“I’ve been changed. There’s a difference. Most of it wasn’t my idea. You’ve changed, too, you know.”

“Me?” Lelldorin laughed ruefully. “I’m afraid not, my friend. The mess I’ve made of things in the past week is proof that I haven’t changed at all.”

“That will take a bit of straightening out, won’t it?” Garion agreed.

“The funny part about it all is that there is a perverse sort of logic about the whole thing. There wasn’t one single thing you did that was actually insane. It’s just when you put them all together that it starts to look like a catastrophe.”

Lelldorin sighed. “And now my poor Ariana and I are doomed to perpetual exile.”

“I think we’ll be able to fix it,” Garion assured him. “Your uncle will forgive you, and Torasin probably will, too. He likes you too much to stay angry for long. Baron Oltorain is probably very put out with you, but he’s a Mimbrate Arend. He’ll forgive anything if it’s done for love. We might have to wait until his leg heals up again, though. That was the part that was a real blunder, Lelldorin. You shouldn’t have broken his leg.”

“Next time I’ll try to avoid that,” Lelldorin promised quickly.

“Next time?”

They both laughed then and talked on as their candle flickered in the vagrant drafts stirred by the raging storm. After an hour or so, the worst of the gale seemed to pass, and the two of them found their eyes growing heavy once more.

“Why don’t we try to sleep again?” Garion suggested.

“I’ll blow out the candle,” Lelldorin agreed. He got up out of bed and stepped to the table. “Are you ready?” he asked Garion.

Garion slept again almost immediately, and almost immediately heard a sibilant whisper in his ear and felt a dry, cold touch. “Are you ready?” the whispering voice hissed, and he turned to look with uncomprehending eyes at the face of Queen Salmissra, a face that shifted back and forth from woman to snake to something midway between.

Then he stood beneath the shimmering dome of the cave of the Gods and moved without thought to touch the unblemished, walnut-colored shoulder of the stillborn colt, thrusting his hand into the absolute silence of death itself.

“Are you ready?” Belgarath asked quite calmly.

“I think so.”

“All right. Put your will against it and push.”

“It’s awfully heavy, Grandfather.”

“You don’t have to pick it up, Garion. Just push it. It will roll over if you do it right. Hurry up. We have a great deal more to do.”

Garion began to gather his will.

And then he sat on a hillside with his cousin Adara. In his hand he held a dead twig and a few wisps of dry grass.

“Are you ready?” the voice in his mind asked him.

“Is this going to mean anything?” Garion asked. “I mean, will it make any difference?”

“That depends on you and how well you do it.”

“That’s not a very good answer.”

“It wasn’t a very good question. If you’re ready, turn the twig into a flower.”

Garion did that and looked critically at the result. “It’s not a very good flower, is it?” he apologized.

“It will have to do,” the voice told him.

“Let me try it again.”

“What are you going to do with this one?”

“I’ll just—” Garion raised his hand to obliterate the defective bloom he had just created.

“That’s forbidden, you know,” the voice reminded him.

“I made it, didn’t I?”

“That has nothing to do with it. You can’t unmake it. It will be fine. Come along now. We have to hurry.”

“I’m not ready yet.”

“That’s too bad. We can’t wait any longer.”

And then Garion woke up. He felt oddly light-headed, as if his troubled sleep had done him more harm than good. Lelldorin was still deep in slumber, and Garion found his clothes in the dark, pulled them on and quietly left the room. The strange dream nagged at his mind as he wandered in the dimly lighted corridors of Iron-grip’s Citadel. He still felt that pressing urgency and the peculiar sense that everyone was waiting impatiently for him to do something.

He found a windswept courtyard where snow had piled up in the corners and the stones were black and shiny with ice. Dawn was just breaking, and the battlements surrounding the courtyard were etched sharply against a sky filled with scudding cloud.

Beyond the courtyard lay the stables—warm, smelling of fragrant hay and of horses. Durnik had already found his way there. As was so frequently the case, the smith was uncomfortable in the presence of nobility, and he sought the company of animals instead. “Couldn’t you sleep either?” he asked as Garion entered the stable.

Garion shrugged. “For some reason sleep just made things worse. I feel as if my head’s stuffed full of straw.”

“Joyous Erastide, Garion,” Durnik said then.

“That’s right. It is, isn’t it?” In all the rush, the holiday seemed to have crept up on him. “Joyous Erastide, Durnik.”

The colt, who had been sleeping in a back stall, nickered softly as he caught Garion’s scent, and Garion and Durnik went back to where the small animal stood.

“Joyous Erastide, horse,” Garion greeted him a bit whimsically. The colt nuzzled at him. “Do you think that the storm has blown over completely?” Garion asked Durnik as he rubbed the colt’s ears. “Or is there more on the way?”

“It has the smell of being over,” Durnik answered. “Weather could smell differently here on this island, though.”

Garion nodded his agreement, patted the colt’s neck and turned toward the door. “I suppose I’d better go find Aunt Pol,” he said. “She was saying something last night about wanting to check my clothes. If I make her look for me, she’ll probably make me wish I hadn’t.”

“Age is bringing you wisdom, I see.” Durnik grinned at him. “If anyone wants me, I’ll be here.”

Garion put his hand briefly on Durnik’s shoulder and then left the stable to go looking for Aunt Pol.

He found her in the company of women in the apartment that appeared to have been set aside for her personal use centuries before. Adara was there and Taiba, Queen Layla and Ariana, the Mimbrate girl; in the center of the room stood Princess Ce’Nedra.

“You’re up early,” Aunt Pol observed, her needle flickering as she made some minute modification to Ce’Nedra’s creamy gown.

“I had trouble sleeping,” he told her, looking at the princess with a certain puzzlement. She looked different somehow.

“Don’t stare at me, Garion,” she told him rather primly.

“What have you done to your hair?” he asked her.

Ce’Nedra’s flaming hair had been elaborately arranged, caught at brow and temples by a gold coronet in the form of a band of twined oak leaves. There was some rather intricate braiding involved at the back and then the coppery mass flowed smoothly down over one of her tiny shoulders. “Do you like it?” she asked him.

“That’s not the way you usually wear it,” he noted.

“We’re all aware of that, Garion,” she replied loftily. Then she turned and looked rather critically at her reflection in the mirror. “I’m still not convinced about the braiding, Lady Polgara,” she fretted. “Tolnedran ladies don’t braid their hair. This makes me look like an Alorn.”

“Not entirely, Ce’Nedra,” Adara murmured.

“You know what I mean, Adara—all those buxom blondes with their braids and their milk-maid complexions.”

“Isn’t it a little early to be getting ready?” Garion asked. “Grandfather said that we weren’t going to take the Orb to the throne room until noon.”

“That’s not really that far off, Garion,” Aunt Pol told him, biting a thread and stepping back to look critically at Ce’Nedra’s dress. “What do you think, Layla?”

“She looks just like a princess, Pol,” Queen Layla gushed.

“She is a princess, Layla,” Aunt Pol reminded the plump little queen. Then she turned to Garion. “Get some breakfast and have someone show you the way to the baths,” she instructed. “They’re in the cellars under the west wing. After you’ve bathed, you’ll need a shave. Try not to cut yourself. I don’t want you bleeding all over your good clothes.”

“Do I have to wear all that?”

She gave him a look that immediately answered that question—as well as several others he might have asked.

“I’ll go find Silk,” he agreed quickly. “He’ll know where the baths are.”

“Do that,” she told him quite firmly. “And don’t get lost. When the time comes, I want you to be ready.”

Garion nodded and left. Her words had somehow strangely echoed the words of his dream, and he wondered about that as he went looking for Silk.

The little man was lounging in the company of the others in a large, torch-lighted room in the west wing. The kings were there, with Brand, Belgarath and Garion’s other friends. They were breakfasting on cakes and hot spiced wine.

“Where did you go this morning?” Lelldorin asked him. “You were gone when I woke up.”

“I couldn’t sleep any more,” Garion replied.

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Why should you lose sleep just because I’m having a restless night?” Garion could see that they were deep in a discussion, and he sat down quietly to wait for the opportunity to speak to Silk.

“I think we’ve managed to aggravate Taur Urgas pretty thoroughly in the past couple of months,” Barak was saying. The big man was sprawled deep in a high-backed chair with his face sunk in the shadows from the flaring torch behind him. “First Relg steals Silk right out from under his nose, then Belgarath destroys Ctuchik and knocks down Rak Cthol in the process of taking back the Orb, and finally Cho-Hag and Hettar exterminate a sizable piece of his army when he tries to follow us. The king of the Murgos has had a bad year.” The big man’s chuckle rumbled out of the shadows. For a moment—a fleeting instant—Garion seemed to see a different shape sprawled there. Some trick of the flickering light and dancing shadows made it appear momentarily that a great, shaggy bear sat in Barak’s place. Then it was gone. Garion rubbed at his eyes and tried to shake off the half bemused reverie that had dogged him all morning.

“I still don’t quite follow what you mean about Relg going into the rock to rescue Prince Kheldar.” King Fulrach frowned. “Do you mean that he can burrow through?”

“I don’t think you’d understand unless you saw it, Fulrach,” Belgarath told him. “Show him, Relg.”

The Ulgo zealot looked at the old man, then walked over to the stone wall beside the large window. Silk instantly turned his back, shuddering. “I still can’t stand to watch that,” he declared to Garion.

“Aunt Pol said I was supposed to ask you the way to the baths,” Garion said quietly. “She wants me to get cleaned up and shaved, and then I guess I’m supposed to put on my best clothes.”

“I’ll go with you,” Silk offered. “I’m sure that all these gentlemen are going to be fascinated by Relg’s demonstration, and they’ll want him to repeat it. What’s he doing?”

“He stuck his arm through the wall and he’s wiggling his fingers at them from outside the window,” Garion reported.

Silk glanced once over his shoulder, then shuddered again and quickly averted his eyes. “That makes my blood cold,” he said with revulsion. “Let’s go bathe.”

“I’ll go along,” Lelldorin said, and the three of them quietly left the room.

The baths were in a cavernous cellar beneath the west wing of the Citadel. There were hot springs deep in the rock, and they bubbled up to fill the tiled chambers with steam and a faintly sulfurous smell. There were but few torches and only one attendant who wordlessly handed them towels and then went off into the steam to manage the valves that adjusted the water temperature.

“The big pool there gets hotter the closer you go toward the far end,” Silk told Garion and Lelldorin as they all disrobed. “Some people say you should go in until it’s as hot as you can stand it, but I prefer just to pick a comfortable temperature and soak.” He splashed down into the water.

“Are you sure we’ll be alone here?” Garion asked nervously. “I don’t think I’d care to have a group of ladies come trooping in while I’m trying to bathe.”

“The women’s baths are separate,” Silk assured him. “The Rivans are very proper about that sort of thing. They aren’t nearly as advanced as the Tolnedrans yet.”

“Are you really sure that bathing in the wintertime is healthy?” Lelldorin asked, eyeing the steaming water suspiciously.

Garion plunged into the pool and moved quickly out of the tepid water at the near end toward the hotter area. The steam rose more thickly as he waded out into the pool, and the pair of torches set in rings on the back wall receded into a kind of ruddy glow. The tiled walls echoed back the sounds of their voices and splashing with a peculiar, cavernlike hollowness. The steam eddied up out of the water, and he found himself suddenly shut off by it, separated from his friends in the hazy dimness. The hot water relaxed him, and he seemed almost to want to float, half aware, and let it soak out all memory—all the past and all the future. Dreamily he lay back, and then, not knowing why, he allowed himself to sink beneath the dark, steaming water. How long he floated, his eyes closed and all sense suspended, he could not have said, but finally his face rose to the surface and he stood up, the water streaming out of his hair and down across his shoulders. He felt strangely purified by his immersion. And then the sun broke through the tattered cloud outside for a moment, and a single shaft of sunlight streamed down through a small grilled window to fall fully upon Garion. The sudden light was diffused by the steam and seemed to flicker with an opalescent fire.

“Hail, Belgarion,” the voice in his mind said to him. “I greet thee on this Erastide.” There was no hint of the usual amusement in the voice, and the formality seemed strange, significant.

“Thank you,” Garion replied gravely, and they did not speak again. The steam rose and eddied about him as he waded back toward the cooler reaches of the pool where Silk and Lelldorin, both sunk to their necks in warm water, were talking quietly together.

About half an hour before noon, Garion, in response to a summons from Aunt Pol, walked down a long stone corridor toward a room a few steps from the huge, carved doors that gave entrance into the Hall of the Rivan King. He was wearing his best doublet and hose, and his soft leather half boots had been brushed until they glowed. Aunt Pol wore a deep blue robe, cowled and belted at the waist. For once Belgarath, also blue-robed, did not look rumpled or spotted. The old man’s face was very serious; as he and Aunt Pol spoke together, there was no hint of the banter that usually marked their conversation. Seated quietly in the corner of the little room, Errand, dressed all in white linen, gravely watched.

“You look very nice, Garion,” Aunt Pol said, reaching out to smooth his sandy hair back from his forehead.

“Shouldn’t we go inside?” Garion asked. He had seen others, grayclad Rivans and the more brightly garbed visitors entering the hall.

“We will, Garion,” she replied. “All in good time.” She turned to Belgarath. “How long?” she asked.

“Another quarter-hour or so,” he replied.

“Is everything ready?”

“Ask Garion,” the old man told her. “I’ve taken care of everything I can. The rest is up to him.”

Aunt Pol turned to Garion then, her eyes very serious and the white lock at her brow gleaming silver in the darkness of her hair. “Well, Garion,” she asked, “are you ready?”

He looked at her, baffled. “I had the oddest dream last night,” he said. “Everyone kept asking me that same question. What does it mean, Aunt Pol? Am I ready for what?”

“That will become clearer in a bit,” Belgarath told him. “Take out your amulet. You’ll wear it on the outside of your clothes today.”

“I thought it was supposed to be out of sight.”

“Today’s different,” the old man replied. “As a matter of fact, today’s unlike any day I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen a lot of them.”

“Because it’s Erastide?”

“That’s part of it.” Belgarath reached inside his robe and drew out his own silver medallion. He glanced at it briefly. “It’s getting a little worn,” he noted. Then he smiled. “—but then, so am I, I suppose.”

Aunt Pol drew out her amulet. She and Belgarath each reached out to take Garion’s hands and then to join their own.

“It’s been a long time coming, Polgara,” Belgarath said.

“Yes it has, father,” Aunt Pol agreed.

“Any regrets?”

“I can live with them, Old Wolf”

“Let’s go in then.”

Garion started toward the door.

“Not you, Garion,” Aunt Pol told him. “You’ll wait here with Errand. You two will come in later.”

“You’ll send somebody for us?” he asked her. “What I mean is, how will we know when we’re supposed to come in?”

“You’ll know,” Belgarath told him. And then they left him alone with Errand.

“They didn’t give us very complete instructions, did they?” Garion said to the child. “I hope we don’t make any mistakes.”

Errand smiled confidently, reached out and put his small hand in Garion’s. At his touch, the song of the Orb filled Garion’s mind again, sponging away his worries and doubts. He could not have said how long he stood holding the child’s hand and immersed in that song.

“It’s come at last, Belgarion.” The voice seemed to come from outside somehow, no longer confined within Garion’s mind, and the look on Errand’s face made it quite clear that he also could hear the words.

“Is this what I’m supposed to do?” Garion asked.

“It’s part of it.”

“What are they doing in there?” Garion looked rather curiously toward the door.

“They’re getting the people in the Hall ready for what’s going to happen. ”

“Will they be ready?”

“Will you?” There was a pause. “Are you ready, Belgarion?”

“Yes,” Garion replied. “Whatever it is, I think I’m ready for it.”

“Let’s go then.”

“You’ll tell me what to do?”

“If it’s necessary. ”

With his hand still holding Errand’s, Garion walked toward the door. He raised his other hand to push it open, but it swung inexplicably open ahead of him before he touched it.

There were two guards at the huge, carved door a few steps down the hall, but they seemed frozen into immobility as Garion and Errand approached. Once again Garion raised his hand, and the immense doors to the Hall of the Rivan King swung silently open in response to his hand alone.

The Hall of the Rivan King was a huge, vaulted throne room with massive and ornately carved wooden buttresses supporting the ceiling beams. The walls were festooned with banners and green boughs, and hundreds of candles burned in iron sconces. Three great stone firepits were set at intervals in the floor; instead of logs, blocks of peat glowed in the pits, radiating an even, fragrant warmth. The Hall was crowded, but there was a broad avenue of blue carpet leading from the doors to the throne. Garion’s eyes, however, scarcely noted the crowd. His thoughts seemed suspended by the song of the Orb, which now filled his mind completely. Bemused, freed of all thought or fear or hint of self consciousness, he walked with Errand close beside him toward the front of the Hall where Aunt Pol and Belgarath stood, one on each side of the throne.

The throne of the Rivan King had been chiseled from a single basalt block. Its back and arms were all one height, and there was a massiveness about it that made it seem more permanent than the mountains themselves. It sat solidly against the wall and, hanging point downward above it, was a great sword.

Somewhere in the Citadel, a bell had begun to peal, and the sound of it mingled with the song of the Orb as Garion and Errand moved down the long, carpeted pathway toward the front of the Hall. As they passed each sconce, the candles inexplicably dropped to the merest pinpoint. There was no draft, no flickering, as, one by one, the candles dimmed and the Hall filled with deepening shadow.

When they reached the front of the Hall, Belgarath, his face a mystery, looked gravely at them for a moment, then looked out at the throng assembled in the Hall of the Rivan King.

“Behold the Orb of Aldur,” he announced in a solemn voice.

Errand released Garion’s hand, tugged open the pouch, and reached inside. As he turned to face the darkened Hall, Errand drew the round gray stone out of the pouch and lifted it with both hands, displaying it for all to see.

The song of the Orb was overpowering; joining with it, there was a kind of vast, shimmering sound. The sound seemed to soar, rising, ringing higher and higher as Garion stood beside the child, looking at the faces of the assemblage. Within the stone Errand held aloft there seemed to be a pinpoint of intense blue light. The light grew brighter as the shimmering sound rose higher. The faces before him were all familiar, Garion could see. Barak was there and Lelldorin, Hettar, Durnik, Silk, and Mandorallen. Seated in a royal box beside the Tolnedran ambassador, with Adara and Ariana directly behind her, was Ce’Nedra, looking every inch an Imperial Princess. But, mingled somehow with the familiar faces were others—strange, stark faces, each so caught up in a single overriding identity that they seemed almost masklike. Mingled with Barak was the Dreadful Bear, and Hettar bore with him the sense of thousands upon thousands of horses. With Silk stood the figure of the Guide and with Relg that of the Blind Man. Lelldorin was the Archer and Mandorallen the Knight Protector. Seeming to hover in the air above Taiba was the sorrowing form of the Mother of the Race That Died, and her sorrow was like the sorrow of Mara. And Ce’Nedra was no longer a princess but now a queen—the one Ctuchik had called the Queen of the World. Strangest of all, Durnik, good solid Durnik, stood with his two lives plainly evident on his face. In the searing blue light of the Orb and with the strange sound shimmering in his ears, Garion looked in wonder at his friends, realizing with amazement that he was seeing for the first time what Belgarath and Aunt Pol had seen all along.

From behind him he heard Aunt Pol speak, her voice calm and very gentle. “Your task is completed, Errand. You may now give up the Orb.”

The little boy crowed with delight, turned, and presented the glowing Orb to Garion. Uncomprehending, Garion stared at the fiery stone. He could not take it. It was death to touch the Orb.

“Reach forth thy hand, Belgarion, and receive thy birthright from the child who hath borne it unto thee.” It was the familiar voice, and yet at the same time it was not. When this voice spoke, there was no possibility of refusal. Garion’s hand stretched out without his even being aware that it was moving.

“Errand!” the child declared, firmly depositing the Orb in Garion’s outstretched hand. Garion felt the peculiar, seething touch of it against the mark on his palm. It was alive! He could feel the life in it, even as he stared in blank incomprehension at the living fire he held in his naked hand.

“Return the Orb to the pommel of the sword of the Rivan King,” the voice instructed, and Garion turned with instant, unthinking obedience. He stepped up onto the seat of the basalt throne and then onto the wide ledge formed by its back and arms. He stretched up, taking hold of the huge sword hilt to steady himself, and placed the Orb on the great sword’s pommel. There was a faint but clearly audible click as the Orb and the sword became one, and Garion could feel the living force of the Orb surging down through the hilt he gripped in one hand. The great blade began to glow, and the shimmering sound rose yet another octave. Then the huge weapon quite suddenly came free from the wall to which it had been attached for so many centuries. The throng in the Hall gasped. As the sword began to drop free, Garion caught hold of the hilt with both hands, half turning as he did so, striving to keep the great blade from falling to the floor.

What pulled him off balance was the fact that it had no apparent weight. The sword was so huge that he should not have been able to hold it, much less lift it; but as he braced himself with his feet widespread and his shoulders pressed back against the wall, the point of the sword rose easily until the great blade stood upright before him. He stared at it in amazement, feeling a strange throbbing between the hands he had clasped about the hilt. The Orb flared and began to pulsate. Then, as the shimmering sound soared into a mighty crescendo of jubilation, the sword of the Rivan King burst into a great tongue of searing blue flame. Without knowing why, Garion lifted the flaming sword over his head with both hands, staring up at it in wonder.

“Let Aloria rejoice!” Belgarath called out in a voice like thunder, “for the Rivan King has returned! All hail Belgarion, King of Riva and Overlord of the West!”

And yet in the midst of the turmoil that followed and even with the shimmering chorus of what seemed a million million voices raised in an exultation echoing from one end of the universe to the other, there was a sullen clang of iron as if the rust-scoured door of some dark tomb had suddenly burst open, and the sound of that clanging chilled Garion’s heart. A voice echoed hollowly from the tomb, and it did not join the universal rejoicing. Ripped from its centuries of slumber, the voice in the tomb awoke raging and crying out for blood.

Stunned past all thought, Garion stood with his flaming sword aloft as, with a steely rustle, the assembled Alorns unsheathed their swords to raise them in salute.

“Hail Belgarion, my King,” Brand, the Rivan Warder, boomed, sinking to one knee and lifting his sword. His four sons knelt behind him, their swords also lifted. “Hail Belgarion, King of Riva!” they cried.

“Hail Belgarion!” The great shout shook the Hall of the Rivan King, and a forest of upraised swords glittered in the fiery blue light of the flaming blade in Garion’s hands. Somewhere within the Citadel, a bell began to peal. As the news raced through the breathless city below, other bells caught the sound, and their iron rejoicing echoed back from the rocky crags to announce to the icy waters of the sea the return of the Rivan King.

One in the Hall, however, did not rejoice. In the instant that the kindling of the sword had irrevocably announced Garion’s identity, Princess Ce’Nedra had started to her feet, her face deathly pale and her eyes wide with absolute consternation. She had instantly grasped something that eluded him—something so unsettling that it drained the color from her face and brought her to her feet to stare at him with an expression of total dismay. Then there suddenly burst from the lips of the Imperial Princess Ce’Nedra a wail of outrage and protest.

With a voice that rang in the rafters she cried out, “OH NO!”

12

The worst part of it all was that people kept bowing to him. Garion had not the slightest idea of how he should respond. Should he bow back? Should he nod slightly in acknowledgment? Or perhaps might it not be better just to ignore the whole business and act as if he hadn’t seen it, or something? But what was he supposed to do when someone called him, “Your Majesty”?

The events of the previous day were still a confused blur in his mind. He seemed to remember being presented to the people of the city standing on the battlements of Iron-grip’s Citadel with a great, cheering throng below and the huge sword that somehow seemed weightless still blazing in his hands. Stupendous as they were, however, the overt events of the day were unimportant when compared to things which were taking place on a different level of reality. Enormous forces had focused on the moment of the revelation of the Rivan King, and Garion was still numb as a result of things he had seen and perceived in that blinding instant when he had at last discovered who he was.

There had been endless congratulations and a great many preparations for his coronation, but all of that blurred in his mind. Had his life depended upon it, he could not have given a rational, coherent account of the day’s events.

Today promised to be even worse, if that were possible. He had not slept well. For one thing, the great bed in the royal apartments to which he had been escorted the previous evening was definitely uncomfortable.

It had great round posts rising from each comer and it was canopied and curtained in purple velvet. It seemed much too large for him and it was noticeably on the soft side. For the past year and more he had done most of his sleeping on the ground, and the down-filled mattress on the royal bed was too yielding to be comfortable. There was, moreover, the sure and certain knowledge that as soon as he arose, he was going to be the absolute center of attention.

On the whole, he decided, it might just be simpler to stay in bed. The more he thought about that, the better it sounded. The door to the royal bedchamber, however, was not locked. Sometime not long after sunrise it swung open, and Garion could hear someone moving around. Curious he peeked through the purple drapery enclosing his bed. A soberlooking servant was busily opening the drapes at the window and stirring up the fire. Garion’s attention, however, moved immediately to the large, covered silver tray sitting on the table by the fireplace. His nose recognized sausage and warm, fresh-baked bread—and butter—there was definitely butter involved somewhere on that tray. His stomach began to speak to him in a loud voice.

The servant glanced around the room to make sure everything was in order, then came to the bed with a no-nonsense expression. Garion burrowed quickly back under the covers.

“Breakfast, your Majesty,” the servant announced firmly, drawing the curtains open and tying them back.

Garion sighed. Quite obviously, decisions about staying in bed were not his to make. “Thank you,” he replied.

“Does your Majesty require anything else?” the servant asked solicitously, holding open a robe for Garion to put on.

“Uh-no-not right now, thank you,” Garion answered, climbing out of the royal bed and down the three carpeted steps leading up to it. The servant helped him into the robe, then bowed and quietly left the room. Garion went to the table, seated himself, lifted the cover from the tray, and assaulted breakfast vigorously.

When he had finished eating, he sat for a time in a large, blue-upholstered armchair looking out the window at the snowy crags looming above the city. The storm that had raked the coast for days had blown off—at least for the moment; the winter sun was bright, and the morning sky very blue. The young Rivan King stared for a time out his window, lost in thought.

Something nagged at the back of his memory—something he had heard once but had since forgotten. It seemed that there was something he ought to remember that involved Princess Ce’Nedra. The tiny girl had fled from the Hall of the Rivan King almost immediately after the sword had so flamboyantly announced his identity the previous day. He was fairly sure that it was all mixed together. Whatever it was that he was trying to recall had been directly involved in her flight. With some people it might be better to let things quiet down before clearing the air, but Garion knew that this was not the proper way to deal with Ce’Nedra. Things should never be allowed to fester in her mind. That only made matters worse. He sighed and began to dress.

As he walked purposefully through the corridors, he met with startled looks and hasty bows. He soon realized that the events of the preceding day had forever robbed him of his anonymity. Someone Garion could never catch a glimpse of his face—even went so far as to follow him, probably in the hope of performing some service. Whoever it was kept a discrete distance behind, but Garion caught occasional glimpses of him far back along the corridor—a gray-cloaked man who moved on strangely noiseless feet. Garion did not like being followed, whatever the reason, but he resisted the urge to turn around and tell the man to go away.

The Princess Ce’Nedra had been given several rooms just down the hall from Aunt Pol’s apartments, and Garion steeled himself as he raised his hand to rap on the door.

“Your Majesty,” Ce’Nedra’s maid greeted him with a startled curtsy.

“Would you please ask her Highness if I might have a word with her?” Garion asked.

“Certainly, your Majesty,” the girl replied and darted into the next chamber.

There was a brief murmur of voices and then Ce’Nedra swept into the room. She wore a plain gown, and her face was as pale as it had been the previous day. “Your Majesty,” she greeted him in an icy voice, and then she curtsied, a stiff little curtsy that spoke whole volumes.

“Something’s bothering you,” Garion said bluntly. “Would you like to get it out in the open?”

“Whatever your Majesty wishes,” she replied.

“Do we have to do this?”

“I can’t imagine what your Majesty is talking about.”

“Don’t you think we know each other well enough to be honest?”

“Of course. I suppose I’d better accustom myself to obeying your Majesty immediately.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t pretend that you don’t know,” she flared.

“Ce’Nedra, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.” She looked at him suspiciously, then her eyes softened just a bit.

“Perhaps you don’t at that,” she murmured. “Have you ever read the Accords of Vo Mimbre?”

“You taught me how to read yourself,” he reminded her, “about six or eight months ago. You know every book I’ve read. You gave me most of them yourself.”

“That’s true, isn’t it?” she said. “Wait just a moment. I’ll be right back.” She went briefly into the adjoining room and returned with a rolled parchment. “I’ll read it to you,” she told him. “Some of the words are a little difficult.”

“I’m not that stupid,” he objected.

But she had already begun to read. “ ‘—And when it shall come to pass that the Rivan King returns, he shall have Lordship and Dominion, and swear we all fealty to him as Overlord of the Kingdoms of the West. And he shall have an Imperial Princess of Tolnedra to wife, and—’”

“Wait a minute,” Garion interrupted her with a strangled note in his voice.

“Was there something you didn’t understand? It all seems quite clear to me.”

“What was that last part again?”

“-‘he shall have an Imperial Princess of Tolnedra to wife, and...’”

“Are there any other princesses in Tolnedra?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then that means—” He gaped at her.

“Precisely.” She said it like a steel trap suddenly snapping shut.

“Is that why you ran out of the Hall yesterday?”

“I did not run.”

“You don’t want to marry me.” It was almost an accusation.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then you do want to marry me?”

“I didn’t say that either—but it doesn’t really matter, does it? We don’t have any choice at all—neither one of us.”

“Is that what’s bothering you?”

Her look was lofty. “Of course not. I’ve always known that my husband would be selected for me.”

“What’s the problem, then?”

“I’m an Imperial Princess, Garion.”

“I know that.”

“I’m not accustomed to being anyone’s inferior.”

“Inferior? To who—whom?”

“The Accords state that you are the Overlord of the West.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, your Majesty, that you outrank me.”

“Is that all that’s got you so upset?”

Her look was like a drawn dagger. “With your Majesty’s permission, I believe I’d like to withdraw.” And without waiting for an answer, she swept from the room.

Garion stared after her. This was going too far. He considered going immediately to Aunt Pol to protest, but the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that she would be totally unsympathetic. Too many little things began to click together all at once. Aunt Pol was not merely a party to this absurd notion; she had actively done everything in her power to make absolutely sure that there was no escape for him. He needed someone to talk to—someone devious enough and unscrupulous enough to think a way out of this. He left Ce’Nedra’s sitting room and went looking for Silk.

The little man was not in his room, and the servant who was making up the bed kept bowing as he stammered out his apologies at not having the slightest notion of where Silk might be. Garion left quickly.

Since the apartment Barak shared with his wife and children was only a few steps down the corridor, Garion went there, trying not to look back at the gray-cloaked attendant he knew was still following him. “Barak,” he said, knocking on the big Cherek’s door, “it’s me, Garion. May I come in?”

The Lady Merel opened the door immediately and curtsied respectfully.

“Please, don’t do that,” Garion begged her.

“What’s the trouble, Garion?” Barak asked from the green-covered chair where he sat, bouncing his infant son on his knee.

“I’m looking for Silk,” Garion replied, entering the large, comfortable room that was littered with clothes and children’s toys.

“You’re a little wild around the eyes,” the big man noted. “Is something wrong?”

“I’ve just had some very unsettling news,” Garion told him, shuddering. “I need to talk to Silk. Maybe he can come up with an answer for me.”

“Would you like some breakfast?” Lady Merel suggested.

“I’ve already eaten, thank you,” Garion replied. He looked at her a bit more closely. She had undone the rather severe braids she customarily wore, and her blond hair framed her face softly. She wore her usual green gown, but her carriage seemed not to have the rigidity it had always had. Barak, Garion noted, had also lost a bit of the grim defensiveness that had always been there previously when he was in the presence of his wife.

Barak’s two daughters entered the room then, one on each side of Errand. They all sat down in the corner and began playing an elaborate little game that seemed to involve a great deal of giggling.

“I think my daughters have decided to steal him.” Barak grinned. “Quite suddenly I’m up to my ears in wife and children, and the funny part about it is that I don’t seem to mind it at all.”

Merel threw him a quick, almost shy smile. Then she looked over at the laughing children, “The girls absolutely adore him,” she said, and then turned back to Garion. “Have you ever noticed that you can’t look directly into his eyes for more than a moment or so? He seems to be looking right into your heart.”

Garion nodded. “I think it might have something to do with the way he trusts everybody,” he suggested. He turned back to Barak. “Do you have any idea where I might find Silk?”

Barak laughed. “Walk up and down the halls and listen for the rattle of dice. The little thief’s been gambling ever since we got here. Durnik might know. He’s been hiding out in the stables. Royalty makes him nervous.”

“It does the same thing to me,” Garion said.

“But you are royalty, Garion,” Merel reminded him.

“That makes me even more nervous,” he replied.

There was a series of back hallways that led to the stables, and Garion decided to follow that route rather than pass through the more stately corridors where he might encounter members of the nobility. These narrower passageways were used for the most part by servants going to and from the kitchen, and Garion reasoned that most of the minor household staff would probably not recognize him yet. As he walked quickly along one of the passageways with his head down to avoid any chance recognition, he caught another glimpse behind him of the man who had dogged his steps ever since he had left the royal apartment. Irritated finally to the point where he no longer cared about concealing his identity, Garion turned to confront his pursuer. “I know you’re there,” he declared. “Come out where I can see you.” He waited, tapping his foot impatiently.

The hallway behind him remained empty and silent.

“Come out here at once,” Garion repeated, his voice taking on an unaccustomed note of command. But there was no movement, no sound. Garion thought for a moment of retracing his steps to catch this persistent attendant in the act of creeping along behind him, but just then a servant carrying a tray of dirty dishes came along from the direction Garion had just come.

“Did you see anybody back there?” Garion asked him.

“Back where?” the servant said, obviously not recognizing his king.

“Back along the hall.”

The servant shook his head. “I haven’t seen anyone since I left the apartments of the King of Drasnia,” he replied. “Would you believe that this is his third breakfast? I’ve never seen anybody eat so much.” He looked curiously at Garion. “You shouldn’t be back here, you know,” he warned. “If the head cook catches you, he’ll thrash you. He doesn’t like anybody in this hall who doesn’t have business here.”

“I’m just on my way to the stables,” Garion told him.

“I’d move right along, then. The head cook’s got a vicious temper.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Garion assured him.

Lelldorin was coming out of the stable, and he gave Garion a startled look as the two of them approached each other in the snowy courtyard. “How did you manage to escape from all the officials?” he asked. Then, as if remembering, he bowed.

“Please don’t do that, Lelldorin,” Garion told him.

“The situation is a bit awkward, isn’t it?” Lelldorin agreed.

“We’ll behave toward each other the same as we always have behaved,” Garion said firmly. “At least until they tell us we can’t. Have you any idea where Silk might be?”

“I saw him earlier this morning,” Lelldorin replied. “He said he was going to visit the baths. He looked a bit unwell. I think he celebrated last night.”

“Let’s go find him,” Garion suggested. “I’ve got to talk to him.”

They found Silk sitting in a tiled stone room thick with steam. The little man had a towel about his waist and he was sweating profusely.

“Are you sure this is good for you?” Garion asked, waving his hand in front of his face to clear an eddying cloud of steam.

“Nothing would really be good for me this morning, Garion,” Silk replied sadly. He put his elbows on his knees and sank his face miserably into his hands.

“Are you sick?”

“Horribly.”

“If you knew it was going to make you feel this way, why did you drink so much last night?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time—at least I think it did. I seem to have lost track of several hours.” An attendant brought the suffering man a foaming tankard, and Silk drank deeply.

“Is that really wise?” Lelldorin asked him.

“Probably not,” Silk admitted with a shudder, “but it’s the best I could come up with on short notice.” He shuddered again. “I feel absolutely wretched,” he declared. “Was there anything in particular you wanted?”

“I’ve got a problem,” Garion blurted. He looked quickly at Lelldorin. “I’d rather this didn’t go beyond the three of us,” he said.

“You have my oath on it,” Lelldorin responded instantly.

“Thank you, Lelldorin.” It was easier to accept the oath than to try to explain why it wasn’t really necessary. “I’ve just read the Accords of Vo Mimbre,” he told them. “Actually, I had them read to me. Did you know that I’m supposed to marry Ce’Nedra?”

“I hadn’t actually put that part together yet,” Silk admitted, “but the Accords do mention something about it, don’t they?”

“Congratulations, Garion!” Lelldorin exclaimed, suddenly clapping his friend on the shoulder. “She’s a beautiful girl.”

Garion ignored that. “Can you think of some way I can get out of it?” he demanded of Silk.

“Garion, right now I can’t really think of anything except how awful I feel. My first hunch though, is that there isn’t any way out for you. Every kingdom in the west is signatory to the Accords—and then I think the Prophecy’s involved too.”

“I’d forgotten about that,” Garion admitted glumly.

“I’m sure they’ll give you time to get used to the idea,” Lelldorin said.

“But how much time will they give Ce’Nedra? I talked to her this morning, and she’s not happy about the idea at all.”

“She doesn’t actually dislike you,” Silk told him.

“That’s not what the problem is. She seems to think that I outrank her, and that’s what’s got her upset.”

Silk began to laugh weakly.

“A real friend wouldn’t laugh,” Garion accused him.

“Is rank really that important to your princess?” Lelldorin asked.

“Probably not much more important than her right arm,” Garion replied sourly. “I think she reminds herself that she’s an Imperial Princess six or eight times every hour. She makes a pretty big issue about it. Now I come along from out of nowhere, and suddenly I outrank her. It’s the sort of thing that’s going to set her teeth on edge-permanently, I expect.” He stopped and looked rather closely at Silk. “Do you think there’s any chance of your getting well today?”

“What have you got in mind?”

“Do you know your way around Riva at all?”

“Naturally.”

“I was sort of thinking that I ought to go down into the city—not with trumpets blowing and all that—but just dressed like somebody ordinary. I don’t know anything at all about the Rivans, and now—” He faltered with it.

“And now you’re their king,” Lelldorin finished for him.

“It’s probably not a bad idea,” Silk agreed. “Though I can’t really say for sure. My brain isn’t working too well just now. It will have to be today, of course. Your coronation’s scheduled for tomorrow, and your movements are likely to be restricted after they’ve put the crown on your head.”

Garion didn’t want to think about that.

“I hope the two of you don’t mind if I take a little while to pull myself together first, though,” Silk added, drinking from the tankard again. “Actually it doesn’t really matter if you mind or not. It’s a question of necessity.”

It took the rat-faced little man only about an hour to recuperate. His remedies were brutally direct. He soaked up hot steam and cold ale in approximately equal amounts, then emerged from the steamroom to plunge directly into a pool of icy water. He was blue and shaking when he came out, but the worst of his indisposition seemed to be gone. He carefully selected nondescript clothes for the three of them, then led the way out of the Citadel by way of a side gate. As they left, Garion glanced back several times, but he seemed to have shaken off the persistent attendant who had been following him all morning.

As they wandered down into the city, Garion was struck again by the bleak severity of the place. The outsides of the houses were uniformly gray and totally lacking any form of exterior decoration. They were solid, square, and absolutely colorless. The gray cloak which was the outstanding feature of the Rivan national costume gave the people in the narrow streets an appearance of that same grimness. Garion quailed a bit at the thought of spending the rest of his life in so uninviting a place.

They walked down a long street in pale winter sunshine with the salt smell of the harbor strong in their nostrils and passed a house from which came the sound of children singing. Their voices were very clear and merged together in subtle harmonies. Garion was astonished at the complexity of the children’s song.

“A national pastime,” Silk said. “Rivans are very much involved in music. I suppose it helps relieve the boredom. I’d hate to offend your Majesty, but your kingdom’s a tedious sort of place.” He looked around. “I have an old friend who lives not far from here. Why don’t we pay him a visit?”

He led them down a long stairway to the street below. Not far up that street a large building stood solidly on the downhill side. Silk strode up to the door and knocked. After a moment, a Rivan in a burn-spotted leather smock answered. “Radek, old friend,” he said with a certain surprise. “I haven’t seen you in years.”

“Torgan.” Silk grinned at him. “I thought I’d stop by and see how you were doing.”

“Come in, come in,” Torgan said, opening the door wider.

“You’ve expanded things a bit, I see,” Silk noticed, looking around.

“The market’s been good to me,” Torgan replied modestly. “The perfume makers in Tol Borune are buying just about any kind of bottle they can get.” The Rivan was a solid-looking man with iron-gray hair and strangely rounded and rosy cheeks. He glanced curiously at Garion and frowned slightly as if trying to remember something. Garion turned to examine a row of delicate little glass bottles standing neatly on a nearby table, trying to keep his face turned away.

“You’re concentrating on bottle making then?” Silk asked.

“Oh, we still try to turn out a few good pieces,” Torgan replied a bit ruefully. “I’ve got an apprentice who’s an absolute genius. I have to let him spend a certain amount of time on his own work. I’m afraid that if I kept him blowing bottles all day, he’d leave me.” The glassmaker opened a cabinet and carefully took out a small velvet-wrapped bundle. “This is a piece of his work,” he said, folding back the cloth.

It was a crystal wren, wings half spread, and it was perched on a leafy twig with buds at its tip. The entire piece was so detailed that even the individual feathers were clearly visible. “Amazing,” Silk gasped, examining the glass bird. “This is exquisite, Torgan. How did he get the colors so perfect?”

“I have no idea,” Torgan admitted. “He doesn’t even measure when he mixes, and the colors always come out exactly right. As I said, he’s a genius.” He carefully rewrapped the crystal bird and placed it back in the cabinet.

There were living quarters behind the workshop, and the rooms were filled with warmth and affection and vibrant colors. Brightly colored cushions were everywhere, and paintings hung on the walls in every room. Torgan’s apprentices seemed to be not so much workers as members of his family, and his eldest daughter played for them as they concentrated on the molten glass, her fingers touching the strings of her harp in cascading waterfalls of music.

“It’s so unlike the outside,” Lelldorin observed, his face puzzled.

“What’s that?” Silk asked him.

“The outside is so grim—so stiff and gray—but once you come inside the building, it’s all warmth and color.”

Torgan smiled. “It’s something outsiders don’t expect,” he agreed.

“Our houses are very much like ourselves. Out of necessity, the outside is bleak. The city of Riva was built to defend the Orb, and every house is part of the overall fortifications. We can’t change the outside, but inside we have art and poetry and music. We ourselves wear the gray cloak. It’s a useful garment—woven from the wool of goats—light, warm, nearly waterproof—but it won’t accept dye, so it’s always gray. But even though we’re gray on the outside, that doesn’t mean that we have no love of beauty.”

The more Garion thought about that, the more he began to understand these bleak-appearing islanders. The stiff reserve of the gray-cloaked Rivans was a face they presented to the world. Behind that face, however, was an altogether different kind of people.

The apprentices for the most part were blowing the delicate little bottles that were the major item in the trade with the perfume makers of Tol Borune. One apprentice, however, worked alone, fashioning a glass ship cresting a crystal wave. He was a sandy-haired young man with an intent expression. When he looked up from his work and saw Garion, his eyes widened, but he lowered his head quickly to his work again.

Back at the front of the shop as they were preparing to leave, Garion asked to look once more at the delicate glass bird perched on its gleaming twig. The piece was so beautiful that it made his heart ache.

“Does it please your Majesty?” It was the young apprentice, who had quietly entered from the workroom. He spoke softly. “I was in the square yesterday when Brand introduced you to the people,” he explained. “I recognized you as soon as I saw you.”

“What’s your name?” Garion asked curiously.

“Joran, your Majesty,” the apprentice replied.

“Do you suppose we could skip the ‘Majesties’?” Garion said rather plaintively. “I’m not really comfortable with that sort of thing yet. The whole business came as a complete surprise to me.”

Joran grinned at him. “There are all kinds of rumors in the city. They say you were raised by Belgarath the Sorcerer in his tower in the Vale of Aldur.”

“Actually I was raised in Sendaria by my Aunt Pol, Belgarath’s daughter.”

“Polgara the Sorceress?” Joran looked impressed. “Is she as beautiful as men say she is?”

“I’ve always thought so.”

“Can she really turn herself into a dragon?”

“I suppose she could if she wanted to,” Garion admitted, “but she prefers the shape of an owl. She loves birds for some reason—and birds go wild at the sight of her. They talk to her all the time.”

“What an amazing thing,” Joran marvelled. “I’d give anything to be able to meet her.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully, hesitating a moment. “Do you think she’d like this little thing?” he blurted finally, touching the crystal wren.

“Like it?” Garion said. “She’d love it.”

“Would you give it to her for me?”

“Joran!” Garion was startled at the idea. “I couldn’t take it. It’s too valuable, and I don’t have any money to pay you for it.”

Joran smiled shyly. “It’s only glass,” he pointed out, “and glass is only melted sand—and sand’s the cheapest thing in the world. If you think she’d like it, I’d really like for her to have it. Would you take it to her for me—please? Tell her it’s a gift from Joran the glassmaker.”

“I will, Joran,” Garion promised, impulsively clasping the young man’s hand. “I’ll be proud to carry it to her for you.”

“I’ll wrap it,” Joran said then. “It’s not good for glass to go out in the cold from a warm room.” He reached for the piece of velvet, then stopped. “I’m not being entirely honest with you,” he admitted, looking a bit guilty. “The wren’s a very good piece, and if the nobles up at the Citadel see it, they might want me to make other things for them. I need a few commissions if I’m ever going to open my own shop, and—” He glanced once at Torgan’s daughter, his heart in his eyes.

“—And you can’t get married until you’ve established your own business?” Garion suggested.

“Your Majesty will be a very wise king,” Joran said gravely.

“If I can get past all the blunders I’ll make during the first few weeks,” Garion added ruefully.

Later that afternoon he delivered the crystal bird to Aunt Pol in her private apartment.

“What’s this?” she asked, taking the cloth-wrapped object.

“It’s a present for you from a young glassmaker I met down in the city,” Garion replied. “He insisted that I give it to you. His name’s Joran. Be careful. I think it’s kind of fragile.”

Aunt Pol gently unwrapped the crystal piece. Her eyes slowly widened as she stared at the exquisitely wrought bird. “Oh, Garion,” she murmured, “it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“He’s awfully good,” Garion told her. “He works for a glassmaker called Torgan, and Torgan says he’s a genius. He wants to meet you.”

“And I want to meet him,” she breathed, her eyes lost in the glowing detail of the glass figure. Then she carefully set the crystal wren down on a table. Her hands were trembling and her glorious eyes were full of tears.

“What’s wrong, Aunt Pol?” Garion asked her, slightly alarmed.

“Nothing, Garion,” she replied. “Nothing at all.”

“Why are you crying then?”

“You’d never understand, dear,” she told him. Then she put her arms around him and pulled him to her in an almost fierce embrace.

The coronation took place at noon the following day. The Hall of the Rivan King was full to overflowing with nobles and royalty, and the city below was alive with the sound of bells.

Garion could never actually remember very much of his coronation. He did remember that the ermine-bordered cape was hot and that the plain gold crown the Rivan Deacon placed on his head was very heavy. What stood out most in his mind was the way the Orb of Aldur filled the entire Hall with an intense blue light that grew brighter and brighter as he approached the throne and overwhelmed his ears with that strange, exultant song he always seemed to hear whenever he came near it. The song of the Orb was so loud that he scarcely heard the great cheer that greeted him as he turned, robed and crowned, to face the throng in the Hall of the Rivan King.

He did, however, hear one voice very clearly.

“Hail, Belgarion,” the voice in his mind said quietly to him.

13

King Belgarion sat somewhat disconsolately on his throne in the Hall of the Rivan King, listening to the endless, droning voice of Valgon, the Tolnedran ambassador. It had not been an easy time for Garion. There were so many things he did not know how to do. For one thing, he was totally incapable of giving orders; for another, he discovered that he had absolutely no time to himself and that he had not the faintest idea of how to dismiss the servants who continually hovered near him. He was followed wherever he went, and he had even given up trying to catch the overzealous bodyguard or valet or messenger who was always in the passageways behind him.

His friends seemed uncomfortable in his presence and they persisted in calling him “your Majesty” no matter how many times he asked them not to. He didn’t feel any different, and his mirror told him that he didn’t look any different, but everyone behaved as if he had changed somehow. The look of relief that passed over their faces each time he left injured him, and he retreated into a kind of protective shell, nursing his loneliness in silence.

Aunt Pol stood continually at his side now, but there was a difference there as well. Before, he had always been an adjunct to her, but now it was the other way around, and that seemed profoundly unnatural.

“The proposal, if your Majesty will forgive my saying so, is most generous,” Valgon observed, concluding his reading of the latest treaty offered by Ran Borune. The Tolnedran ambassador was a sardonic man with an aquiline nose and an aristocratic bearing. He was a Honethite, a member of that family which had founded the Empire and from which the Imperial dynasties had sprung, and he had a scarcely concealed contempt for all Alorns. Valgon was a continual thorn in Garion’s side. Hardly a day passed that some new treaty or trade agreement did not arrive from the Emperor. Garion had quickly perceived that the Tolnedrans were desperately nervous about the fact that they did not have his signature on a single piece of parchment, and they were proceeding on the theory that if they kept shoving documents in front of a man, eventually he would sign something just to get them to leave him alone.

Garion’s counterstrategy was very simple; he refused to sign anything.

“It’s exactly the same as the one they offered last week,” Aunt Pol’s voice observed in the silence of his mind. “All they did was switch the clauses around and change a few words. Tell him no.”

Garion looked at the smug ambassador with something very close to active dislike. “Totally out of the question,” he replied shortly.

Valgon began to protest, but Garion cut him short. “It’s identical to last week’s proposal, Valgon, and we both know it. The answer was no then, and it’s still no. I will not give Tolnedra preferred status in trade with Riva; I will not agree to ask Ran Borune’s permission before I sign any agreement with any other nation; and I most certainly will not agree to any modification of the terms of the Accords of Vo Mimbre. Please ask Ran Borune not to pester me any more until he’s ready to talk sense.”

“Your Majesty!” Valgon sounded shocked. “One does not speak so to the Emperor of Tolnedra.”

“I’ll speak any way I please,” Garion told him. “You have my—our permission to leave.”

“Your Majesty—”

“You’re dismissed, Valgon,” Garion cut him off.

The ambassador drew himself up, bowed coldly, and stalked from the Hall.

“Not bad,” King Anheg drawled from the partially concealed embrasure where he and the other kings generally gathered. The presence of these royal onlookers made Garion perpetually uneasy. He knew they were watching his every move, judging, evaluating his decisions, his manner, his words. He knew he was bound to make mistakes during these first few months, and he’d have greatly preferred to make them without an audience, but how could he tell a group of sovereign kings that he would prefer not to be the absolute center of their attention?

“A trifle blunt, though, wouldn’t you say?” King Fulrach suggested.

“He’ll learn to be more diplomatic in time,” King Rhodar predicted.

“I expect that Ran Borune will find this directness refreshing just as soon as he recovers from the fit of apoplexy our Belgarion’s reply is going to give him.”

The assembled kings and nobles all laughed at King Rhodar’s sally, and Garion tried without success to keep from blushing.

“Do they have to do that?” he whispered furiously to Aunt Pol. “Every time I so much as hiccup, I get all this commentary.”

“Don’t be surly, dear,” she replied calmly. “It was a trifle impolite, though. Are you really sure you want to take that tone with your future father-in-law?”

That was something of which Garion most definitely did not wish to be reminded. The Princess Ce’Nedra had still not forgiven him for his sudden elevation, and Garion was having grave doubts about the whole notion of marrying her. Much as he liked her—and he did like her—he regretfully concluded that Ce’Nedra would not make him a good wife. She was clever and spoiled, and she had a streak of stubbornness in her nature as wide as an oxcart. Garion was fairly certain that she would take a perverse delight in making his life as miserable as she possibly could. As he sat on his throne listening to the jocular comments of the Alorn Kings, he began to wish that he had never heard of the Orb.

As always, the thought of the jewel made him glance up to where it glowed on the pommel of the massive sword hanging above the throne. There was something so irritatingly smug about the way it glowed each time he sat on the throne. It always seemed to be congratulating itself—as if he, Belgarion of Riva, were somehow its own private creation. Garion did not understand the Orb. There was an awareness about it; he knew that. His mind had tentatively touched that awareness and then had carefully retreated. Garion had been touched on occasion by the minds of Gods, but the consciousness of the Orb was altogether different. There was a power in it he could not even begin to comprehend. More than that, its attachment for him seemed quite irrational. Garion knew himself, and he was painfully aware that he was not that lovable. But each time he came near it, it would begin to glow insufferably, and his mind would fill with that strange, soaring song he had first heard in Ctuchik’s turret. The song of the Orb was a kind of compelling invitation. Garion knew that if he should take it up, its will would join with his, and there would be nothing that between them they could not do. Torak had raised the Orb and had cracked the world with it. Garion knew that if he chose, he could raise the Orb and mend that crack. More alarming was the fact that as soon as the notion occurred to him, the Orb began to provide him with precise instructions on how to go about it.

“Pay attention, Garion,” Aunt Pol’s voice said to him.

The business of the morning, however, was very nearly completed. There were a few other petitions and a peculiar note of congratulation that had arrived that morning from Nyissa. The tone of the note was tentatively conciliatory, and it appeared over the signature of Sadi the eunuch. Garion decided that he wanted to think things through rather carefully before he drafted a reply. The memory of what had happened in Salmissra’s throne room still bothered him, and he was not entirely sure he wanted to normalize relations with the snake-people just yet.

Then, since there was no further court business, he excused himself and left the Hall. His ermine-trimmed robe was very hot, and the crown was beginning to give him a headache. He most definitely wanted to return to his apartment and change clothes.

The guards at the side door to the Hall bowed respectfully as he passed them and drew up into formation to accompany him. “I’m not really going anyplace,” Garion told the sergeant in charge. “Just back to my rooms, and I know the way. Why don’t you and your men go have some lunch?”

“Your Majesty is very kind,” the sergeant replied. “Will you need us later?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll send somebody to let you know.”

The sergeant bowed again, and Garion went on along the dimly lighted corridor. He had found this passageway about two days after his coronation. It was relatively unused and it was the most direct route from the royal apartment to the throne room. Garion liked it because he could follow it to and from the great Hall with a minimum of pomp and ceremony. There were only a few doors, and the candles on the walls were spaced far enough apart to keep the light subdued. The dimness seemed comforting for some reason, almost as if it restored in some measure his anonymity.

He walked along, lost in thought. There were so many things to worry about. The impending war between the West and the Angarak kingdoms was uppermost in his mind. He, as Overlord of the West, would be expected to lead the West; and Kal Torak, awakened from his slumber, would come against him with the multitudes of Angarak. How could he possibly face so terrible an adversary? The very name of Torak chilled him, and what did he know about armies and battles? Inevitably, he would blunder, and Torak would smash all the forces of the West with one mailed fist.

Not even sorcery could help him. His own power was still too untried to risk a confrontation with Torak. Aunt Pol would do her best to aid him, of course, but without Belgarath they had little hope of success; and Belgarath had still not given any indication that his collapse had not permanently impaired his abilities.

Garion did not want to think about that any more, but his other problems were nearly as bad. Very soon he was going to have to come to grips with Ce’Nedra’s adamant refusal to make peace. If she would only be reasonable, Garion was sure that the marginal difference in their rank would not make all that much difference. He liked Ce’Nedra. He was even prepared to admit that his feelings for her went quite a bit deeper than that. She could—usually when she wanted something—be absolutely adorable. If they could just get past this one minor problem, things might turn out rather well. That possibility brightened his thoughts considerably. Musing about it, he continued on down the corridor.

He had gone only a few more yards when he heard that furtive step behind him again. He sighed, wishing that his ever-present attendant would find some other amusement. Then he shrugged and, deep in thought about the Nyissan question, he continued on along the corridor.

The warning was quite sharp and came at the last instant. “Look out!” the voice in his mind barked at him. Not knowing exactly why, not even actually thinking about it, Garion reacted instantly, diving headlong to the floor. His crown went rolling as, with a great shower of sparks, a thrown dagger clashed into the stone wall and went bouncing and skittering along the flagstones. Garion swore, rolled quickly and came to his feet with his own dagger in his hand. Outraged and infuriated by this sudden attack, he ran back along the corridor, his ermine-trimmed robe flapping and tangling cumbersomely around his legs.

He caught only one or two momentary glimpses of his gray-cloaked attacker as he ran after the knife thrower. The assassin dodged into a recessed doorway some yards down the corridor, and Garion heard a heavy door slam behind the fleeing man. When he reached the door and wrenched it open, his dagger still in his fist, he found only another long, dim passageway. There was no one in sight.

His hands were shaking, but it was more from anger than from fright. He briefly considered calling the guards, but almost immediately dismissed that idea. To continue following the assailant was, the more he thought about it, even more unwise. He had no weapon but his dagger, and the possibility of meeting someone armed with a sword occurred to him. There might even be more than one involved in this business, and these dimly lighted and deserted corridors were most certainly not a good place for confrontations.

As he started to close the door, something caught his eye. A small scrap of gray wool lay on the floor just at the edge of the door frame. Garion bent, picked it up and carried it over to one of the candles hanging along the wall. The bit of wool was no more than two fingers wide and seemed to have been torn from the corner of a gray Rivan cloak. In his haste to escape, the assassin had, Garion surmised, inadvertently slammed the door on his own cape, and then had ripped off this fragment in his flight. Garion’s eyes narrowed and he turned and hurried back up the corridor, stooping once to retrieve his crown and again to pick up his assailant’s dagger. He looked around once. The hallway was empty and somehow threatening. If the unknown knife thrower were to return with three or four companions, things could turn unpleasant. All things considered, it might be best to get back to his own apartments as quickly as possible—and to lock his door. Since there was no one around to witness any lack of dignity, Garion lifted the skirts of his royal robe and bolted like a rabbit for safety.

He reached his own door, jerked it open and jumped inside, closing and locking it behind him. He stood with his ear against the door, listening for any sounds of pursuit.

“Is something wrong, your Majesty?”

Garion almost jumped out of his skin. He whirled to confront his valet, whose eyes widened as he saw the daggers in the king’s hands. “Uh-nothing” he replied quickly, trying to cover his confusion. “Help me out of this thing.” He struggled with the fastenings of his robe. His hands seemed to be full of daggers and crowns. With a negligent flip he tossed his crown into a nearby chair, sheathed his own dagger and then carefully laid the other knife and the scrap of wool cloth on the polished table.

The valet helped him to remove the robe and then carefully folded it over his arm. “Would your Majesty like to have me get rid of these for you?” he asked, looking a bit distastefully at the dagger and the bit of wool on the table.

“No,” Garion told him firmly. Then a thought occurred to him. “Do you know where my sword is?” he asked.

“Your Majesty’s sword hangs in the throne room,” the valet replied.

“Not that one,” Garion said. “The other one. The one I was wearing when I first came here.”

“I suppose I could find it,” the valet answered a bit dubiously.

“Do that,” Garion said. “I think I’d like to have it where I can get my hands on it. And please see if you can find Lelldorin of Wildantor for me. I need to talk to him.”

“At once, your Majesty.” The valet bowed and quietly left the room. Garion took up the dagger and the scrap of cloth and examined both rather closely. The dagger was just a commonplace knife, heavy, sturdily made and with a wirebound hilt. It bore no ornaments or identifying marks of any kind. Its tip was slightly bent, the result of its contact with the stone wall. Whoever had thrown it had thrown very hard. Garion developed a definitely uncomfortable sensation between his shoulder blades. The dagger would probably not be very useful. There were undoubtedly a hundred like it in the Citadel. The wool scrap, on the other hand, might prove to be very valuable. Somewhere in this fortress, there was a man with the corner of his cloak torn off. The torn cloak and this little piece of cloth would very likely match rather closely.

About a half an hour later Lelldorin arrived. “You sent for me, Garion?” he asked.

“Sit down, Lelldorin,” Garion told his friend, then pointedly waited until the valet left the room. “I think I’ve got a little bit of a problem,” he said then, sprawling deeper in the chair by the table. “I wondered if I might ask your help.”

“You know you don’t have to ask, Garion,” the earnest young Asturian told him.

“This has to be just between the two of us,” Garion cautioned. “I don’t want anyone else to know.”

“My word of honor on it,” Lelldorin replied instantly.

Garion slid the dagger across the table to his friend. “A little while ago when I was on my way back here, somebody threw this at me.”

Lelldorin gasped and his eyes went wide. “Treason?” he gasped. “Either that or something personal,” Garion replied. “I don’t know what it’s all about.”

“You must alert your guards,” Lelldorin declared, jumping to his feet.

“No,” Garion answered firmly. “If I do that, they’ll lock me up entirely. I don’t have very much freedom left at all, and I don’t want to lose it.”

“Did you see him at all?” Lelldorin asked, sitting down again and examining the dagger.

“Just his back. He was wearing one of those gray cloaks.”

“All Rivan wear gray cloaks, Garion.”

“We do have something to work with, though.” Garion took the scrap of wool out from under his tunic. “After he threw the knife, he ran through a door and slammed it shut behind him. He caught his cloak in the door and this got ripped off.”

Lelldorin examined the bit of cloth. “It looks like a corner,” he noted.

“That’s what I think, too,” Garion agreed. “If we both keep our eyes open, we might just happen to see somebody with the corner of his cloak missing. Then, if we can get our hands on his cloak, we might be able to see if this piece matches.”

Lelldorin nodded his agreement, his face hardening. “When we find him, though, I want to deal with him. A king isn’t supposed to become personally involved in that sort of thing.”

“I might decide to suspend the rules,” Garion said grimly. “I don’t like having knives thrown at me. But let’s find out who it is first.”

“I’ll start at once,” Lelldorin said, rising quickly. “I’ll examine every corner of every cloak in Riva if I have to. We’ll find this traitor, Garion. I promise you.”

Garion felt better after that, but it was still a wary young king who, in the company of a detachment of guards, went late that afternoon to the private apartments of the Rivan Warder. He looked about constantly as he walked, and his hand was never far from the hilt of the sword at his waist.

He found Brand seated before a large harp. The Warder’s big hands seemed to caress the strings of the instrument, bringing forth a plaintively rippling melody. The big, grim man’s face was soft and reflective as he played, and Garion found that the music was even more beautiful because it was so unexpected.

“You play very well, my Lord,” he said respectfully as the last notes of the song lingered in the strings.

“I play often, your Majesty,” Brand replied. “Sometimes as I play I can even forget that my wife is no longer with me.” He rose from the chair in front of the harp and squared his shoulders, all softness going out of his face. “How may I serve you, King Belgarion?”

Garion cleared his throat a trifle nervously. “I’m probably not going to say this very well,” he admitted, “but please take it the way I mean it and not the way it might come out.”

“Certainly, your Majesty.”

“I didn’t ask for all this, you know,” Garion began with a vague gesture that took in the entire Citadel. “The crown, I mean, and being king—all of it. I was really pretty happy the way I was.”

“Yes, your Majesty?”

“What I’m trying to get at is—well—you were the ruler here in Riva until I came along.”

Brand nodded soberly.

“I didn’t really want to be king,” Garion rushed on, “and I certainly didn’t want to push you out of your position.”

Brand looked at him, and then he slowly smiled. “I’d wondered why you seemed so uneasy whenever I came into the room, your Majesty. Is that what’s been making you uncomfortable?”

Mutely, Garion nodded.

“You don’t really know us yet, Belgarion,” Brand told him. “You’ve only been here for a little more than a month. We’re a peculiar sort of people. For over three thousand years we’ve been protecting the Orb ever since Iron-grip came to this island. That’s why we exist, and I think that one of the things we’ve lost along the way is that sense of self other men seem to feel is so important. Do you know why I’m called Brand?”

“I never really thought about it,” Garion admitted.

“I do have another name, of course,” Brand said, “but I’m not supposed ever to mention it. Each Warder has been called Brand so that there could never be any sense of personal glory in the office. We serve the Orb; that’s our only purpose. To be quite honest with you, I’m really rather glad you came when you did. It was getting close to the time when I was supposed to choose my successor—with the help of the Orb, of course. But I didn’t have the faintest idea whom to choose. Your arrival has relieved me of that task.”

“We can be friends, then?”

“I think we already are, Belgarion,” Brand replied gravely. “We both serve the same master, and that always brings men close together.”

Garion hesitated. “Am I doing all right?” he blurted.

Brand considered that. “Some of the things you’ve done weren’t exactly the way I might have done them, but that’s to be expected. Rhodar and Anheg don’t always do things the same way either. Each of us has his own particular manner.”

“They make fun of me, don’t they—Anheg, Rhodar, and the others. I hear all the clever remarks every time I make a decision.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about that, Belgarion. They’re Alorns, and Alorns don’t take kings very seriously. They make fun of each other too, you know. You could almost say that as long as they’re joking, everything is all right. If they suddenly become very serious and formal, then you’ll know that you’re in trouble.”

“I suppose I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Garion admitted.

“You’ll get used to it in time,” Brand assured him.

Garion felt much better after his conversation with Brand. In the company of his guards he started back toward the royal apartments; but part way there, he changed his mind and went looking for Aunt Pol instead. When he entered her rooms, his cousin Adara was sitting quietly with her, watching as Aunt Pol carefully mended one of Garion’s old tunics. The girl rose and curtsied formally.

“Please Adara,” he said in a pained voice, “don’t do that when we’re alone. I see enough of it out there.” He gestured in the direction of the more public parts of the building.

“Whatever your Majesty wishes,” she replied.

“And don’t call me that. I’m still just Garion.”

She looked gravely at him with her calm, beautiful eyes. “No, cousin,” she disagreed, “you’ll never be ‘just Garion’ any more.”

He sighed as the truth of that struck his heart.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said then, “I must go attend Queen Silar. She’s a bit unwell, and she says it comforts her to have me near.”

“It comforts all of us when you’re near,” Garion told her without even thinking about it.

She smiled at him fondly.

“There might be some hope for him after all,” Aunt Pol observed, her needle busy.

Adara looked at Garion. “He has never really been that bad, Lady Polgara,” she said. She inclined her head toward them both and quietly left the room.

Garion wandered around for a few moments and then flung himself into a chair. A great deal had happened that day, and he felt suddenly at odds with the whole world.

Aunt Pol continued to sew.

“Why are you doing that?” Garion demanded finally. “I’ll never wear that old thing again.”

“It needs fixing, dear,” she told him placidly.

“There are a hundred people around who could do it for you.”

“I prefer to do it myself.”

“Put it down and talk to me.”

She set the tunic aside and looked at him inquiringly. “And what did your Majesty wish to discuss?” she inquired.

“Aunt Pol!” Garion’s voice was stricken. “Not you too.”

“Don’t give orders then, dear,” she recommended, picking up the tunic again.

Garion watched her at her sewing for a few moments, not really knowing what to say. A strange thought occurred to him. “Why are you doing that, Aunt Pol?” he asked, really curious this time. “Probably nobody’ll ever use it again, so you’re just wasting time on it.”

“It’s my time, dear,” she reminded him. She looked up from her sewing, her eyes unreadable. Then, without explanation she held up the tunic with one hand and ran the forefinger of her other hand carefully up the rip. Garion felt a very light surge, and the sound was only a whisper. The rip mended itself before his eyes, rewoven as if it had never existed. “Now you can see how completely useless mending it really is,” she told him.

“Why do you do it then?”

“Because I like to sew, dear,” she replied. With a sharp little jerk she ripped the tunic again. Then she picked up her needle and patiently began repairing the rip. “Sewing keeps the hands and eyes busy, but leaves the mind free for other things. It’s very relaxing.”

“Sometimes you’re awfully complicated, Aunt Pol.”

“Yes, dear. I know.”

Garion paced about for a bit, then suddenly knelt beside her chair and, pushing her sewing aside, he put his head into her lap. “Oh, Aunt Pol,” he said, very close to tears.

“What’s the matter, dear?” she asked, carefully smoothing his hair.

“I’m so lonely.”

“Is that all?”

He lifted his head and stared at her incredulously. He had not expected that.

“Everyone is lonely, dear,” she explained, drawing him close to her. “We touch other people only briefly, then we’re alone again. You’ll get used to it in time.”

“Nobody will talk to me now—not the way they did before. They’re always bowing and saying ‘Your Majesty’ to me.”

“You are the king, after all,” she replied.

“But I don’t want to be.”

“That’s too bad. It’s the destiny of your family, so there’s not a thing you can do about it. Did anyone ever tell you about Prince Gared?”

“I don’t think so. Who was he?”

“He was the only survivor when the Nyissan assassins killed King Gorek and his family. He escaped by throwing himself into the sea.”

“How old was he?”

“Six. He was a very brave child. Everyone thought that he had drowned and that his body had been washed out to sea. Your grandfather and I encouraged that belief. For thirteen hundred years we’ve hidden Prince Gared’s descendants. For generations they’ve lived out their lives in quiet obscurity for the single purpose of bringing you to the throne—and now you say that you don’t want to be king?”

“I don’t know any of those people,” he said sullenly. He knew he was behaving badly, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.

“Would it help if you did know them—some of them, anyway?”

The question baffled him.

“Perhaps it might,” she decided. She laid her sewing aside and stood up, drawing him to his feet. “Come with me,” she told him and led him to the tall window that looked out over the city below. There was a small balcony outside; in one corner where a rain-gutter had cracked, there had built up during the fall and winter a sheet of shiny black ice, curving down over the railing and spreading out on the balcony floor.

Aunt Pol unlatched the window and it swung open, admitting a blast of icy air that made the candles dance. “Look directly into the ice, Garion,” she told him, pointing at the glittering blackness. “Look deep into it.”

He did as she told him and felt the force of her mind at work. Something was in the ice—shapeless at first but emerging slowly and becoming more and more visible. It was, he saw finally, the figure of a pale blond woman, quite lovely and with a warm smile on her lips. She seemed young, and her eyes were directly on Garion’s face. “My baby,” a voice seemed to whisper to him. “My little Garion.”

Garion began to tremble violently. “Mother?” he gasped.

“So tall now,” the whisper continued. “Almost a man.”

“And already a king, Ildera,” Aunt Pol told the phantom in a gentle voice.

“Then he was the chosen one,” the ghost of Garion’s mother exulted. “I knew it. I could feel it when I carried him under my heart.”

A second shape had begun to appear beside the first. It was a tall young man with dark hair but a strangely familiar face. Garion clearly saw its resemblance to his own. “Hail Belgarion, my son,” the second shape said to him.

“Father,” Garion replied, not knowing what else to say.

“Our blessings, Garion,” the second ghost said as the two figures started to fade.

“I avenged you, father,” Garion called after them. It seemed important that they know that. He was never sure, however, if they had heard him.

Aunt Pol was leaning against the window frame with a look of exhaustion on her face.

“Are you all right?” Garion asked her, concerned.

“It’s a very difficult thing to do, dear,” she told him, passing a weary hand over her face.

But there was yet another flicker within the depths of the ice, and the familiar shape of the blue wolf appeared—the one who had joined Belgarath in the fight with Grul the Eldrak in the mountains of Ulgo. The wolf sat looking at them for a moment, then flickered briefly into the shape of a snowy owl and finally became a tawny-haired woman with golden eyes. Her face was so like Aunt Pol’s that Garion could not help glancing quickly back and forth to compare them.

“You left it open, Polgara,” the golden-eyed woman said gently. Her voice was as warm and soft as a summer evening.

“Yes, mother,” Aunt Pol replied. “I’ll close it in a moment.”

“It’s all right, Polgara,” the wolf woman told her daughter. “It gave me the chance to meet him.” She looked directly into Garion’s face. “A touch or two is still there,” she observed. “A bit about the eyes and in the shape of the jaw. Does he know?”

“Not everything, mother,” Aunt Pol answered.

“Perhaps it’s as well,” Poledra noted.

Once again another figure emerged out of the dark depths of the ice. The second woman had hair like sunlight, and her face was even more like Aunt Pol’s than Poledra’s. “Polgara, my dear sister,” she said.

“Beldaran,” Aunt Pol responded in a voice overwhelmed with love.

“And Belgarion,” Garion’s ultimate grandmother said, “the final flower of my love and Riva’s.”

“Our blessings also, Belgarion,” Poledra declared. “Farewell for now, but know that we love thee.” And then the two were gone.

“Does that help?” Aunt Pol asked him, her voice deep with emotion and her eyes filled with tears.

Garion was too stunned by what he had just seen and heard to answer. Dumbly he nodded.

“I’m glad the effort wasn’t wasted then,” she said. “Please close the window, dear. It’s letting the winter in.”

14

It was the first day of spring, and King Belgarion of Riva was terribly nervous. He had watched the approach of Princess Ce’Nedra’s sixteenth birthday with a steadily mounting anxiety and, now that the day had finally arrived, he hovered on the very edge of panic. The deep blue brocade doublet over which a half dozen tailors had labored for weeks still did not seem to feel just right. Somehow it was a bit tight across the shoulders, and the stiff collar scratched his neck. Moreover, his gold crown seemed unusually heavy on this particular day, and, as he fidgeted, his throne seemed even more uncomfortable than usual.

The Hall of the Rivan King had been decorated extensively for the occasion, but even the banners and garlands of pale spring flowers could not mask the ominous starkness of the great throne room. The assembled notables, however, chatted and laughed among themselves as if nothing significant were taking place. Garion felt rather bitter about their heartless lack of concern in the face of what was about to happen to him.

Aunt Pol stood at the left side of his throne, garbed in a new silver gown and with a silver circlet about her hair. Belgarath lounged indolently on the right, wearing a new green doublet which had already become rumpled.

“Don’t squirm so much, dear,” Aunt Pol told Garion calmly.

“That’s easy enough for you to say,” Garion retorted in an accusing tone.

“Try not to think about it,” Belgarath advised. “It will all be over in a little while.”

Then Brand, his face seeming even more bleak than usual, entered the Hall from the side door and came to the dais. “There’s a Nyissan at the gate of the Citadel, your Majesty,” he said quietly. “He says that he’s the emissary of Queen Salmissra and that he’s here to witness the ceremony.”

“Isn’t that impossible?” Garion asked Aunt Pol, startled by the Warder’s surprising announcement.

“Not entirely,” she replied. “More likely, though, it’s a diplomatic fiction. I’d imagine that the Nyissans would prefer to keep Salmissra’s condition a secret.”

“What do I do?” Garion asked. Belgarath shrugged.

“Let him in.”

“In here?” Brand’s voice was shocked. “A Nyissan in the throne room? Belgarath, you’re not serious.”

“Garion is Overlord of the West, Brand,” the old man replied, “and that includes Nyissa. I don’t imagine that the snake-people will be much use to us at any time, but let’s be polite, at least.”

Brand’s face went stiff with disapproval. “What is your Majesty’s decision?” he asked Garion directly.

“Well—” Garion hesitated. “Let him come in, I guess.”

“Don’t vacillate, Garion,” Aunt Pol told him firmly.

“I’m sorry,” Garion said quickly.

“And don’t apologize,” she added. “Kings do not apologize.”

He looked at her helplessly. Then he turned back to Brand. “Tell the emissary from Nyissa to join us,” he said, though his tone was placating.

“By the way, Brand,” Belgarath suggested, “I wouldn’t let anyone get too excited about this. The Nyissan has ambassadorial status, and it would be a serious breach of protocol if he were to die unexpectedly.”

Brand bowed rather stiffly, turned, and left the Hall.

“Was that really necessary, father?” Aunt Pol asked.

“Old grudges die hard, Pol,” Belgarath replied. “Sometimes it’s best to get everything right out in front so that there aren’t any misunderstandings later.”

When the emissary of the Snake Queen entered the Hall, Garion started with surprise. It was Sadi, the chief eunuch in Salmissra’s palace. The thin man with the dead-looking eyes and shaved head wore the customary iridescent blue-green Nyissan robe, and he bowed sinuously as he approached the throne. “Greetings to his Majesty, Belgarion of Riva, from Eternal Salmissra, Queen of the Snake-People,” he intoned in his peculiarly contralto voice.

“Welcome, Sadi,” Garion replied formally.

“My queen sends her regards on this happy day,” Sadi continued.

“She didn’t really, did she?” Garion asked a bit pointedly.

“Not precisely, your Majesty,” Sadi admitted without the least trace of embarrassment. “I’m sure she would have, however, if we’d been able to make her understand what was happening.”

“How is she?” Garion remembered the dreadful transformation Salmissra had undergone.

“Difficult,” Sadi answered blandly. “Of course that’s nothing new. Fortunately she sleeps for a week or two after she’s been fed. She moulted last month, and it made her dreadfully short-tempered.” He rolled his eyes ceilingward. “It was ghastly,” he murmured. “She bit three servants before it was over. They all died immediately, of course.”

“She’s venomous?” Garion was a bit startled at that.

“She’s always been venomous, your Majesty.”

“That’s not the way I mean.”

“Forgive my little joke,” Sadi apologized. “Judging from the reactions of people she’s bitten, I’d guess that she’s at least ten times more deadly than a common cobra.”

“Is she terribly unhappy?” Garion felt a strange pity for the hideously altered queen.

“That’s really rather hard to say, your Majesty,” Sadi replied clinically. “It’s difficult to tell what a snake’s really feeling, you understand. By the time she’d learned to communicate her wishes to us, she seemed to have become reconciled to her new form. We feed her and keep her clean. As long as she has her mirror and someone to bite when she’s feeling peevish, she seems quite content.”

“She still looks at herself in the mirror? I wouldn’t think she’d want to now.”

“Our race has a somewhat different view of the serpent, your Majesty,” Sadi explained. “We find it a rather attractive creature, and our queen is a splendid-looking snake, after all. Her new skin is quite lovely, and she seems very proud of it.” He turned and bowed deeply to Aunt Pol. “Lady Polgara,” he greeted her.

“Sadi,” she acknowledged with a brief nod.

“May I convey to you the heartfelt thanks of her Majesty’s government?”

One of Aunt Pol’s eyebrows rose inquiringly.

“The government, my Lady—not the queen herself. Your—ah—intervention, shall we say, has simplified things in the palace enormously. We no longer have to worry about Salmissra’s whims and peculiar appetites. We rule by committee and we hardly ever find it necessary to poison each other any more. No one’s tried to poison me for months. It’s all very smooth and civilised in Sthiss Tor now.” He glanced briefly at Garion. “May I also offer my congratulations on your success with his Majesty? He seems to have matured considerably. He was really very callow when last we met,”

“Whatever happened to Issus?” Garion asked him, ignoring that particular observation.

Sadi shrugged. “Issus? Oh, he’s still about, scratching out a living as a paid assassin, probably. I imagine that one day we’ll find him floating facedown in the river. It’s the sort of end one expects for someone like that.”

There was a sudden blare of trumpets from just beyond the great doors at the back of the Hall. Garion started nervously, and his mouth quite suddenly went dry.

The heavy doors swung open, and a double file of Tolnedran legionnaires marched in, their breastplates burnished until they shone like mirrors, and the tall crimson plumes on their helmets waving as they marched. The inclusion of the legionnaires in the ceremony had infuriated Brand. The Rivan Warder had stalked about in icy silence for days after he had discovered that Garion had granted ambassador Valgon’s request for a proper escort for Princess Ce’Nedra. Brand did not like Tolnedrans, and he had been looking forward to witnessing the pride of the empire humbled by Ce’Nedra’s forlorn and solitary entrance into the Hall. The presence of the legionnaires spoiled that, of course, and Brand’s disappointment and disapproval had been painfully obvious. As much as Garion wanted to stay on Brand’s good side, however, he did not intend to start off the official relationship between his bride-to-be and himself by publicly humiliating her. Garion was quite ready to acknowledge his lack of education, but he was not prepared to admit to being that stupid.

When Ce’Nedra entered, her hand resting lightly on Valgon’s arm, she was every inch an Imperial Princess. Garion could only gape at her. Although the Accords of Vo Mimbre required that she present herself in her wedding gown, Garion was totally unprepared for such Imperial magnificence. Her gown was of gold and white brocade covered with seed pearls, and its train swept the floor behind her. Her flaming hair was intricately curled and cascaded over her left shoulder like a deep crimson waterfall. Her circlet of tinted gold held in place a short veil that did not so much conceal her face as soften it into luminousness.

She was tiny and perfect, exquisite beyond belief, but her eyes were like little green agates.

She and Valgon moved at stately pace down between the ranks of her tall, burnished legionnaires; when they reached the front of the Hall, they stopped.

Brand, sober-faced and imposing, took his staff of office from Bralon, his eldest son, and rapped sharply on the stone floor with its butt three times. “Her Imperial Highness Ce’Nedra of the Tolnedran Empire,” he announced in a deep, booming voice. “Will your Majesty grant her audience?”

“I will receive the princess,” Garion declared, straightening a bit on his throne.

“The Princess Ce’Nedra may approach the throne,” Brand proclaimed. Though his words were ritual formality, they had obviously been chosen with great care to make it absolutely clear that Imperial Tolnedra came to the Hall of the Rivan King as a suppliant. Ce’Nedra’s eyes flashed fire, and Garion groaned inwardly. The little princess, however, glided to the appointed spot before the dais and curtsied regally. There was no submission in that gesture.

“The Princess has permission to speak,” Brand boomed. For a brief, irrational moment Garion wanted to strangle him.

Ce’Nedra drew herself up, her face as cold as a winter sea. “Thus I, Ce’Nedra, daughter to Ran Borune XXIII and Princess of Imperial Tolnedra, present myself as required by treaty and law in the presence of His Majesty, Belgarion of Riva,” she declared. “And thus has the Tolnedran Empire once more demonstrated her willingness to fulfill her obligations as set forth in the Accords of Vo Mimbre. Let other kingdoms witness Tolnedra’s meticulous response and follow her example in meeting their obligations. I declare before these witnesses that I am an unmarried virgin of a suitable age. Will his Majesty consent to take me to wife?”

Garion’s reply had been carefully thought out. The quiet inner voice had suggested a way to head off years of marital discord. He rose to his feet and said, “I, Belgarion, King of Riva, hereby consent to take the Imperial Princess Ce’Nedra to be my wife and queen. I declare, moreover, that she will rule jointly by my side in Riva and wheresoever else the authority of our throne may extend.”

The gasp that rippled through the Hall was clearly audible, and Brand’s face went absolutely white. The look Ce’Nedra gave Garion was quizzical, and her eyes softened slightly.

“Your Majesty is too kind,” she responded with a graceful little curtsy. Some of the edge had gone out of her voice, and she threw a quick sidelong glance at the spluttering Brand. “Have I your Majesty’s permission to withdraw?” she asked sweetly.

“As your Highness wishes,” Garion replied, sinking back down onto his throne. He was perspiring heavily.

The princess curtsied again with a mischievous little twinkle in her eyes, then turned and left the Hall with her legionnaires drawn up in close order about her.

As the great doors boomed shut behind her, an angry buzz ran through the crowd. The word “outrageous” seemed to be the most frequently repeated.

“This is unheard of, your Majesty,” Brand protested.

“Not entirely,” Garion replied defensively. “The throne of Arendia is held jointly by King Korodullin and Queen Mayaserana.” He looked to Mandorallen, gleaming in his armor, with a mute appeal in his eyes.

“His Majesty speaks truly, my Lord Brand,” Mandorallen declared. “I assure thee that our kingdom suffers not from the lack of singularity upon the throne.”

“That’s Arendia,” Brand objected. “This is Riva. The situations are entirely different. No Alorn kingdom has ever been ruled by a woman.”

“It might not hurt to examine the possible advantages of the situation,” King Rhodar suggested. “My own queen, for example, plays a somewhat more significant role in Drasnian affairs than custom strictly allows.”

With great difficulty Brand regained at least some of his composure. “May I withdraw, your Majesty?” he asked, his face still livid.

“If you wish,” Garion answered quietly. It wasn’t going well. Brand’s conservatism was the one stumbling block he hadn’t considered.

“It’s an interesting notion, dear,” Aunt Pol said quietly to him, “but don’t you think it might have been better to consult with someone before you made it a public declaration?”

“Won’t it help to cement relations with the Tolnedrans?”

“Quite possibly,” she admitted. “I’m not saying that it’s a bad idea, Garion; I just think it might have been better to warn a few people first. What are you laughing at?” she demanded of Belgarath, who was leaning against the throne convulsed with mirth.

“The Bear-cult’s going to have collective apoplexy,” he chortled.

Her eyes widened slightly. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I’d forgotten about them.”

“They aren’t going to like it very much, are they?” Garion concluded. “Particularly since Ce’Nedra’s a Tolnedran.”

“I think you can count on them to go up in flames,” the old sorcerer replied, still laughing.

In the days that followed, the usually bleak halls of the Citadel were filled with color as official visitors and representatives teemed through them, chatting, gossiping, and conducting business in out-of the-way corners. The rich and varied gifts they had brought to celebrate the occasion filled several tables lining one of the walls in the great throne room. Garion, however, was unable to visit or to examine the gifts. He spent his days in a room with his advisers and with the Tolnedran ambassador and his staff as the details of the official betrothal document were hammered out.

Valgon had seized on Garion’s break with tradition and was trying to wring the last measure of advantage from it, while Brand was desperately trying to add clauses and stipulations to circumscribe Ce’Nedra’s authority rigidly. As the two haggled back and forth, Garion found himself more and more frequently staring out the window. The sky over Riva was an intense blue, and puffy white clouds ran before the wind. The bleak crags of the island were touched with the first green blush of spring. Faintly, carried by the wind, the high, clear voice of a shepherdess singing to her flock wafted through the open window. There was a pure, unschooled quality to her voice, and she sang with no hint of self consciousness as if there were not a human ear within a hundred leagues. Garion sighed as the last notes of her song died away and then returned his attention to the tedious negotiations.

His attention, however, was divided in those early days of spring. Since he was unable to pursue the search for the man with the torn cloak himself, he was forced to rely on Lelldorin to press the investigation. Lelldorin was not always entirely reliable, and the search for the would-be assassin seemed to fire the enthusiastic young Asturian’s imagination. He crept about the Citadel with dark, sidelong glances, and reported his lack of findings in conspiratorial whispers. Turning things over to Lelldorin might have been a mistake, but there had been no real choice in the matter. Any of Garion’s other friends would have immediately raised a general outcry, and the entire affair would have been irrevocably out in the open. Garion did not want that. He was not prepared to make any decisions about the assassin until he found out who had thrown the knife and why. Too many other things could have been involved. Only Lelldorin could be relied upon for absolute secrecy, even though there was some danger in turning him loose in the Citadel with a license to track someone down. Lelldorin had a way of turning simple things into catastrophes, and Garion worried almost as much about that as he did about the possibility of another knife hurtling out of the shadows toward his unprotected back.

Among the visitors present for the betrothal ceremonies was Ce’Nedra’s cousin Xera, who was present as the personal representative of Queen Xantha. Though shy at first, the Dryad soon lost her reserve—particularly when she found herself the center of the attention of a cluster of smitten young noblemen.

The gift of Queen Xantha to the royal couple was, Garion thought, somewhat peculiar. Wrapped in plain leaves, Xera presented them with two sprouted acorns. Ce’Nedra, however, seemed delighted. She insisted upon planting the two seeds immediately and rushed down to the small private garden adjoining the royal apartments.

“It’s very nice, I suppose,” Garion commented dubiously as he stood watching his princess on her knees in the damp loam of the garden, busily preparing the earth to receive Queen Xantha’s gift.

Ce’Nedra looked at him sharply. “I don’t believe your Majesty understands the significance of the gift,” she said in that hatefully formal tone she had assumed with him.

“Stop that,” Garion told her crossly. “I still have a name, after all and I’m almost positive you haven’t forgotten it.”

“If your Majesty insists,” she replied loftily.

“My Majesty does. What’s so significant about a couple of nuts?”

She looked at him almost pityingly. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Not if you won’t take the trouble to explain it to me.”

“Very well.” She sounded irritatingly superior. “The one acorn is from my very own tree. The other is from Queen Xantha’s.”

“So?”

“See how impossibly dense he is,” the princess said to her cousin.

“He’s not a Dryad, Ce’Nedra,” Xera replied calmly.

“Obviously.”

Xera turned to Garion. “The acorns are not really from my mother,” she explained. “They’re gifts from the trees themselves.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” Garion demanded of Ce’Nedra.

She sniffed and returned to her digging.

“While they’re still just young shoots, Ce’Nedra will bind them together,” Xera went on. “The shoots will intertwine as they grow, embracing each other and forming a single tree. It’s the Dryad symbol for marriage. The two will become one—just as you and Ce’Nedra will.”

“That remains to be seen,” Ce’Nedra sniffed, trowelling busily in the dirt.

Garion sighed. “I hope the trees are patient.”

“Trees are very patient, Garion,” Xera replied. She made a little gesture that Ce’Nedra could not see, and Garion followed her to the other end of the garden.

“She does love you, you know,” Xera told him quietly. “She won’t admit it, of course, but she loves you. I know her well enough to see that.”

“Why’s she acting the way she is, then?”

“She doesn’t like being forced into things, that’s all.”

“I’m not the one who’s forcing her. Why take it out on me?”

“Whom else can she take it out on?”

Garion hadn’t thought of that. He left the garden quietly. Xera’s words gave him some hope that one of his problems, at least, might eventually be resolved. Ce’Nedra would pout and storm for a while, and then—after she had made him suffer enough—she would relent. Perhaps it might speed things along if he suffered a bit more obviously.

The other problems had not changed significantly. He was still going to have to lead an army against Kal Torak; Belgarath had still given no sign that his power was intact; and someone in the Citadel was still, so far as Garion knew, sharpening another knife for him. He sighed and went back to his own rooms where he could worry in private.

Somewhat later he received word that Aunt Pol wanted to see him in her private apartment. He went immediately and found her seated by the fire, sewing as usual. Belgarath, dressed in his shabby old clothes, sat in one of the deep, comfortable chairs on the other side of the fire with his feet up and a tankard in his hand.

“You wanted to see me, Aunt Pol?” Garion inquired as he entered.

“Yes, dear,” she replied. “Sit down.” She looked at him somewhat critically. “He still doesn’t look much like a king, does he, father?”

“Give him time, Pol,” the old man told her. “He hasn’t been at it for very long.”

“You both knew all along, didn’t you?” Garion accused them. “Who I was, I mean.”

“Naturally,” Aunt Pol answered in that maddening way of hers.

“Well, if you’d wanted me to behave like a king, you should have told me about it. That way I’d have had some time to get used to the idea.”

“It seems to me we discussed this once before,” Belgarath mentioned, “a long time ago. If you’ll stop and think a bit, I’m sure you’ll be able to see why we had to keep it a secret.”

“Maybe.” Garion said it a bit doubtfully. “All this has happened too fast, though. I hadn’t even got used to being a sorcerer yet, and now I have to be a king, too. It’s all got me off balance.”

“You’re adaptable, Garion,” Aunt Pol told him, her needle flickering.

“You’d better give him the amulet, Pol,” Belgarath mentioned. “The princess should be here soon.”

“I was just about to, father,” she replied, laying aside her sewing.

“What’s this?” Garion asked.

“The princess has a gift for you,” Aunt Pol said. “A ring. It’s a bit ostentatious, but act suitably pleased.”

“Shouldn’t I have something to give her in return?”

“I’ve already taken care of that, dear.” She took a small velvet box from the table beside her chair. “You’ll give her this.” She handed the box to Garion.

Inside the box lay a silver amulet, a bit smaller than Garion’s own. Represented on its face in minute and exquisite detail was the likeness of that huge tree which stood in solitary splendor in the center of the Vale of Aldur. There was a crown woven into the branches. Garion held the amulet in his right hand, trying to determine if it had some of the same kind of force about it that he knew was in the one he wore. There was something there, but it didn’t feel at all the same.

“It doesn’t seem to be like ours,” he concluded.

“It isn’t,” Belgarath replied. “Not exactly, anyway. Ce’Nedra’s not a sorceress, so she wouldn’t be able to use one like yours.”

“You said ‘not exactly.’ It does have some kind of power, then?”

“It will give her certain insights,” the old man answered, “if she’s patient enough to learn how to use it.”

“Exactly what are we talking about when we use the word ‘insight’?”

“An ability to see and hear things she wouldn’t otherwise be able to see or hear,” Belgarath specified.

“Is there anything else I should know about it before she gets here?”

“Just tell her that it’s a family heirloom,” Aunt Pol suggested. “It belonged to my sister, Beldaran.”

“You should keep it, Aunt Pol,” Garion objected. “I can get something else for the princess.”

“No, dear. Beldaran wants her to have it.”

Garion found Aunt Pol’s habit of speaking of people long dead in the present tense a trifle disconcerting, so he didn’t pursue the matter. There was a light tap on the door.

“Come in, Ce’Nedra,” Aunt Pol answered.

The little princess was wearing a rather plain green gown open at the throat, and her expression was somewhat subdued.

“Come over by the fire;” Aunt Pol told her. “The evenings are still a bit chilly this time of year.”

“Is it always this cold and damp in Riva?” Ce’Nedra asked, coming to the fire.

“We’re a long ways north of Tol Honeth,” Garion pointed out.

“I’m aware of that,” she said with that little edge in her voice.

“I always thought it was customary to wait until after the wedding to start bickering,” Belgarath observed slyly. “Have the rules changed?”

“Just practicing, Belgarath,” Ce’Nedra replied impishly. “Just practicing for later on.”

The old man laughed. “You can be a charming little girl when you put your mind to it,” he said.

Ce’Nedra bowed mockingly. Then she turned to Garion. “It’s customary for a Tolnedran girl to give her betrothed a gift of a certain value,” she informed him. She held up a heavy, ornate ring set with several glowing stones. “This ring belonged to Ran Horb II, the greatest of all Tolnedran Emperors. Wearing it might help you to be a better king.”

Garion sighed. It was going to be one of those meetings. “I’ll be honored to wear the ring,” he replied as inoffensively as possible, “and I’d like for you to wear this.” He handed her the velvet box. “It belonged to the wife of Riva Iron-grip, Aunt Pol’s sister.”

Ce’Nedra took the box and opened it. “Why, Garion,” she exclaimed, “it’s lovely.” She held the amulet in her hand, turning it to catch the firelight. “The tree looks so real that you can almost smell the leaves.”

“Thank you,” Belgarath replied modestly.

“You made it?” The princess sounded startled.

The old man nodded. “When Polgara and Beldaran were children, we lived in the Vale. There weren’t very many silversmiths there, so I had to make their amulets myself. Aldur helped me with some of the finer details.”

“This is a priceless gift, Garion.” The tiny girl actually glowed, and Garion began to have some hope for the future. “Help me with it,” she commanded, handing him the two ends of the chain and turning with one hand holding aside the mass of her deep red hair.

“Do you accept the gift, Ce’Nedra?” Aunt Pol asked her, giving the question a peculiar emphasis.

“Of course I do,” the princess replied.

“Without reservation and of your own free will?” Aunt Pol pressed, her eyes intent.

“I accept the gift, Lady Polgara,” Ce’Nedra replied. “Fasten it for me, Garion. Be sure it’s secure. I wouldn’t want it to come undone.”

“I don’t think you’ll need to worry too much about that,” Belgarath told her.

Garion’s fingers trembled slightly as he fastened the curious clasp.

His fingertips tingled peculiarly as the two ends locked together with a faintly audible click.

“Hold the amulet in your hand, Garion,” Aunt Pol instructed him. Ce’Nedra lifted her chin and Garion took the medallion in his right hand. Then Aunt Pol and Belgarath closed their hands over his. Something peculiar seemed to pass through their hands and into the talisman at Ce’Nedra’s throat.

“Now you are sealed to us, Ce’Nedra,” Aunt Pol told the princess quietly, “with a tie that can never be broken.”

Ce’Nedra looked at her with a puzzled expression, and then her eyes slowly widened and a dreadful suspicion began to grow in them.

“Take it off,” she told Garion sharply.

“He can’t do that,” Belgarath informed her, sitting back down and picking up his tankard again.

Ce’Nedra was tugging at the chain, pulling with both hands.

“You’ll just scratch your neck, dear,” Aunt Pol warned gently. “The chain won’t break; it can’t be cut; and it won’t come off over your head. You’ll never have to worry about losing it.”

“You did this,” the princess stormed at Garion.

“Did what?”

“Put this slave chain on me. It wasn’t enough that I had to bow to you; now you’ve put me in chains as well.”

“I didn’t know,” he protested.

“Liar!” she screamed at him. Then she turned and fled the room, sobbing bitterly.

15

Garion was in a sour mood. The prospect of another day of ceremony and tedious conferences was totally unbearable, and he had risen early to escape from the royal bedchamber before the insufferably polite appointment secretary with his endless lists could arrive to nail down the entire day. Garion privately detested the inoffensive fellow, even though he knew the man was only doing his job. A king’s time had to be organized and scheduled, and it was the appointment secretary’s task to take care of that. And so, each morning after breakfast, there came that respectful tapping at the door, and the appointment secretary would enter, bow, and then proceed to arrange the young king’s day, minute by minute. Garion was morbidly convinced that somewhere, probably hidden away and closely guarded, was the ultimate master list that laid out the schedule for the rest of his life—including his royal funeral.

But this day dawned too gloriously for thoughts of stuffy formality and heavy conference. The sun had come boiling up out of the Sea of the Winds, touching the snowfields atop the craggy peaks with a blushing pink, and the morning shadows in the deep valleys above the city were a misty blue. The smell of spring pushed urgently in from the little garden outside his window, and Garion knew he must escape, if only for an hour or so. He dressed quickly in tunic, hose, and soft Rivan boots, rather carefully selecting clothes as unroyal as his wardrobe offered. Pausing only long enough to belt on his sword, he crept out of the royal apartment. He even considered riot taking along his guards, but prudently decided against that.

They were at a standstill in the search for the man who had tried to kill him in that dim hallway, but both Lelldorin and Garion had discovered that the outer garments of any number of Rivans needed repair. The gray cloak was not a ceremonial garment, but rather was something thrown on for warmth. It was a sturdy, utilitarian covering, and quite a number of such robes had been allowed to fall into a condition of shocking disrepair. Moreover, now that spring was here, men would soon stop wearing them, and the only clue to the attacker’s identity would be locked away in a closet somewhere.

Garion brooded about that as he wandered moodily through the silent corridors of the Citadel with two mailed guards following at a respectful distance. The attempt, he reasoned, had not come from a Grolim. Aunt Pol’s peculiar ability to recognize the mind of a Grolim would have alerted her instantly. In all probability the attacker had not been a foreigner of any kind. There were too few foreigners on the island to make that very likely. It had to be a Rivan, but why would a Rivan want to kill the king who had just returned after thirteen hundred years?

He sighed with perplexity over the problem and let his mind drift off to other matters. He wished that he were only Garion again; he wished that more than anything. He wished that it might be possible for him to awaken in some out-of the-way inn somewhere and start out in the silver light of daybreak to ride alone to the top of the next hill to see what lay beyond. He sighed again. He was a public person now, and such freedom was denied him. He was coldly certain that he was never going to have a moment to himself again.

As he passed an open doorway, he suddenly heard a familiar voice. “Sin creeps into our minds the moment we let our thoughts stray,” Relg was saying. Garion stopped, motioning his guards to silence.

“Must everything be a sin?” Taiba asked. Inevitably they were together. They had been together almost continually from the moment Relg had rescued Taiba from her living entombment in the cave beneath Rak Cthol. Garion was almost certain that neither of them was actually conscious of that fact. Moreover, he had seen evidence of discomfort, not only on Taiba’s face, but on Relg’s as well, whenever they were apart. Something beyond the control of either of them drew them together.

“The world is filled with sin,” Relg declared. “We must guard against it constantly. We must stand jealous guard over our purity against all forms of temptation.”

“That would be very tiresome.” Taiba sounded faintly amused.

“I thought you wanted instruction,” Relg accused her. “If you just came here to mock me, I’ll leave right now.”

“Oh, sit down, Relg,” she told him. “We’ll never get anywhere with this if you take offense at everything I say.”

“Have you no idea at all about the meaning of religion?” he asked after a moment. He actually sounded curious about it.

“In the slave pens, the word religion meant death. It meant having your heart cut out.”

“That was a Grolim perversion. Didn’t you have a religion of your own?”

“The slaves came from all over the world, and they prayed to many Gods—usually for death.”

“What about your own people? Who is your God?”

“I was told that his name is Mara. We don’t pray to him though—not since he abandoned us.”

“It’s not man’s place to accuse the Gods,” Relg told her sternly. “Man’s duty is to glorify his God and pray to him—even if the prayers aren’t answered.”

“And what about the God’s duty to man?” she asked pointedly. “Can a God not be negligent as well as a man? Wouldn’t you consider a God negligent if he allowed his children to be enslaved and butchered—or if he allowed his daughters to be given as a reward to other slaves when they pleased their masters—as I was?”

Relg struggled with that painful question.

“I think you’ve led a very sheltered life, Relg,” she told the zealot. “I think you have a very limited idea of human suffering—of the kinds of things men can do to other men—and women—apparently with the full permission of the Gods.”

“You should have killed yourself,” he said stubbornly.

“Whatever for?”

“To avoid corruption, naturally.”

“You are an innocent, aren’t you? I didn’t kill myself because I wasn’t ready to die. Even in the slave pens, life can be sweet, Relg, and death is bitter. What you call corruption is only a small thing—and not even always unpleasant.”

“Sinful woman!” he gasped.

“You worry too much about that, Relg,” she advised him. “Cruelty is a sin; lack of compassion is a sin. But that other little thing? I hardly think so. I begin to wonder about you. Could it be that this UL of yours is not quite so stern and unforgiving as you seem to believe? Does he really want all these prayers and rituals and grovelings? Or are they your way to hide from your God? So you think that praying in a loud voice and pounding your head on the ground will keep him from seeing into your heart?”

Relg was making strangled noises.

“If our Gods really loved us, they’d want our lives filled with joy,” she continued relentlessly. “But you hate joy for some reason—probably because you’re afraid of it. Joy is not sin, Relg; joy is a kind of love, and I think the Gods approve of it—even if you don’t.”

“You’re hopelessly depraved.”

“Perhaps so,” she admitted casually, “but at least I look life right in the face. I’m not afraid of it, and I don’t try to hide from it.”

“Why are you doing this?” he demanded of her in an almost tragic voice. “Why must you forever follow me and mock me with your eyes?”

“I don’t really know,” she replied, sounding almost puzzled. “You’re not really that attractive. Since we left Rak Cthol, I’ve seen dozens of men who interested me much more. At first it was because I knew that I made you nervous and because you were afraid of me. I rather enjoyed that, but lately there’s more to it than that. It doesn’t make any sense, of course. You’re what you are, and I’m what I am, but for some reason I want to be with you.” She paused. “Tell me, Relg—and don’t try to lie about it—would you really want me to go away and never see you again?”

There was a long and painful silence. “May UL forgive me!” Relg groaned finally.

“I’m sure he will, Relg,” she assured him gently.

Garion moved quietly on down the corridor away from the open door. Something he had not understood before had begun to become quite clear. “You’re doing this, aren’t you?” he asked silently.

“Naturally,” the dry voice in his mind replied.

“But why those two?”

“Because it’s necessary, Belgarion. I don’t do things out of whim. We’re all compelled by necessity—even I. Actually, what’s going on between Relg and Taiba doesn’t remotely concern you. ”

Garion was a little stung by that.

“I thought well—”

“You assumed that you were my only care—that you were the absolute center of the universe? You’re not, of course. There are other things almost equally important, and Relg and Taiba are centrally involved in one of those things. Your participation in that particular matter is peripheral at the most.”

“They’re going to be desperately unhappy if you force them together,” Garion accused.

“That doesn’t matter in the slightest. Their being together is necessary. You’re wrong though. It will take them a while to get used to it, but once they do, they’re both going to be very happy. Obedience to necessity does have its rewards, after all.”

Garion struggled with that idea for a while, then finally gave up. His own problems intruded once more on his thoughts. Inevitably, as he always did when he was troubled, he went looking for Aunt Pol. He found her sitting before the cozy fire in her apartment, sipping a cup of fragrant tea and watching through the window as the rosy morning sunlight set the snowfields above the city ablaze.

“You’re up early,” she observed as he entered.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he told her, “and the only way I ever get the chance to do what I want is to leave my room before the man with my schedule for the day shows up.” He flung himself into a chair. “They never give me a minute to myself.”

“You’re an important person now, dear.”

“That wasn’t my idea.” He stared moodily out the window. “Grandfather’s all right now, isn’t he?” he asked suddenly.

“What gave you that idea?”

“Well—the other day, when we gave Ce’Nedra the amulet—didn’t he—sort of—?”

“Most of that came from you, dear,” she replied.

“I felt something else.”

“That could have been just me. It was a pretty subtle thing, and even I couldn’t be sure if he had any part in it.”

“There has to be some way we can find out.”

“There’s only one way, Garion, and that’s for him to do something.”

“All right, let’s go off with him someplace and have him try—something sort of small, maybe.”

“And how would we explain that to him?”

“You mean he doesn’t know?” Garion sat up quickly.

“He might, but I rather doubt it.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

“Of course not. If he has any doubts whatsoever about his ability, he’ll fail, and if he fails once, that will be the end of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A very important part of it is knowing that it’s going to work. If you aren’t absolutely sure, then it won’t. That’s why we can’t tell him.”

Garion thought about it. “I suppose that makes sense, but isn’t it sort of dangerous? I mean, what if something really urgent comes up, and he tries to do something about it, and we all of a sudden find out that he can’t?”

“You and I would have to deal with it then, dear.”

“You seem awfully calm about it.”

“Getting excited doesn’t really help very much, Garion.”

The door burst open, and Queen Layla, her hair awry and her crown slipping precariously over one ear, stormed in. “I won’t have it, Polgara,” she declared angrily. “I absolutely won’t have it. You’ve got to talk to him. Oh, excuse me, your Majesty,” the plump little queen added, noticing Garion. “I didn’t see you.” She curtsied gracefully.

“Your Highness,” Garion replied, getting up hurriedly and bowing in return.

“With whom did you wish me to speak, Layla?” Aunt Pol asked. ”

Anheg. He insists that my poor husband sit up and drink with him every night. Fulrach’s so sick this morning that he can barely lift his head off the pillow. That great bully of a Cherek is ruining my husband’s health.”

“Anheg likes your husband, Layla. It’s his way of showing his friendship.”

“Can’t they be friends without drinking so much?”

“I’ll talk to him, dear,” Aunt Pol promised.

Mollified somewhat, Queen Layla departed, curtsying again to Garion.

Garion was about to return to the subject of Belgarath’s infirmity when Aunt Pol’s maid came in to announce Lady Merel.

Barak’s wife entered the room with a somber expression. “Your Majesty,” she greeted Garion perfunctorily.

Garion rose again to bow and politely respond. He was getting rather tired of it.

“I need to talk with you, Polgara,” Merel declared.

“Of course,” Aunt Pol replied. “Would you excuse us, Garion?”

“I’ll wait in the next room,” he offered. He crossed to the door, but did not close it all the way. Once again his curiosity overcame his good manners.

“They all keep throwing it in my face,” Merel blurted almost before he was out of the room.

“What’s that?”

“Well—” Merel hesitated, then spoke quite firmly. “My lord and I were not always on the best of terms,” she admitted.

“That’s widely known, Merel,” Aunt Pol told her diplomatically.

“That’s the whole problem,” Merel complained. “They all keep laughing behind their hands and waiting for me to go back to being the way I was before.” A note of steel crept into her voice. “Well, it’s not going to happen,” she declared, “so they can laugh all they want to.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Merel,” Aunt Pol replied.

“Oh, Polgara,” Merel said with a helpless little laugh, “he looks so much like a great shaggy bear, but he’s so gentle inside. Why couldn’t I have seen that before? All those years wasted.”

“You had to grow up, Merel,” Aunt Pol told her. “It takes some people longer, that’s all.”

After Lady Merel had left, Garion came back in and looked quizzically at Aunt Pol. “Has it always been like that?” he asked her. “What I mean is—do people always come to you when they’ve got problems?”

“It happens now and then,” she replied. “People seem to think that I’m very wise. Usually they already know what they have to do, so I listen to them and agree with them and give them a bit of harmless support. It makes them happy. I set aside a certain amount of time each morning for these visits. They know that I’m here if they feel the need for someone to talk to. Would you care for some tea?”

He shook his head. “Isn’t it an awful burden—all these other people’s problems, I mean?”

“It’s not really that heavy, Garion,” she answered. “Their problems are usually rather small and domestic. It’s rather pleasant to deal with things that aren’t quite so earthshaking. Besides, I don’t mind visitors whatever their reason for coming.”

The next visitor, however, was Queen Islena, and her problem was more serious. Garion withdrew again when the maid announced that the Queen of Cherek wished to speak privately with the Lady Polgara; but, as before, his curiosity compelled him to listen at the door of the adjoining chamber.

“I’ve tried everything I can think of, Polgara,” Islena declared, “but Grodeg won’t let me go.”

“The High Priest of Belar?”

“He knows everything, naturally,” Islena confirmed. “All his underlings reported my every indiscretion to him. He threatens to tell Anheg if I try to sever my connection with the Bear-cult. How could I have been so stupid? He’s got his hand around my throat.”

“Just how indiscreet have you been, Islena?” Aunt Pol asked the queen pointedly.

“I went to some of their rituals,” Islena confessed. “I put a few cult members in positions in the palace. I passed some information along to Grodeg.”

“Which rituals, Islena?”

“Not those, Polgara,” Islena replied in a shocked voice. “I’d never stoop to that.”

“So all you really did was attend a few harmless gatherings where people dress up in bearskins and let a few cultists into the palace where there were probably a dozen or more already anyway—and pass on a bit of harmless palace gossip?—It was harmless, wasn’t it?”

“I didn’t pass on any state secrets, Polgara, if that’s what you mean,” the queen said stiffly.

“Then Grodeg doesn’t really have any hold over you, Islena.”

“What should I do, Polgara?” the queen asked in an anguished voice.

“Go to Anheg. Tell him everything.”

“I can’t.”

“You must. Otherwise Grodeg will force you into something worse. Actually, the situation could be turned to Anheg’s advantage. Tell me exactly how much you know about what the cult is doing?”

“They’ve begun creating chapters among the peasants, for one thing.”

“They’ve never done that before,” Aunt Pol mused. “The cult’s always been restricted to the nobility and the priesthood.”

“I can’t be sure,” Islena told her, “but I think they’re preparing for something major—some kind of confrontation.”

“I’ll mention it to my father,” Aunt Pol replied. “I think he’ll want to take steps. As long as the cult was the plaything of the priesthood and the minor nobility, it wasn’t really all that important, but rousing the peasantry is quite another thing.”

“I’ve heard a few other things as well,” Islena continued. “I think they’re trying to penetrate Rhodar’s intelligence service. If they can get a few people in the right places in Boktor, they’ll have access to most of the state secrets in the West.”

“I see.” Aunt Pol’s voice was as cold as ice.

“I heard Grodeg talking once,” Islena said in a tone of distaste. “It was before he found out that I didn’t want anything more to do with him. He’d been reading the auguries and the signs in the heavens, and he was talking about the return of the Rivan King. The cult takes the term ‘Overlord of the West’ quite seriously. I honestly believe that their ultimate goal is to elevate Belgarion to the status of Emperor of all the West—Aloria, Sendaria, Arendia, Tolnedra—even Nyissa.”

“That’s not how the term was meant to be interpreted,” Aunt Pol objected.

“I know,” Islena replied, “but Grodeg wants to twist it until it comes out that way. He’s a total fanatic, and he wants to convert all the people of the West to Helar—by the sword, if necessary.”

“That idiot!” Aunt Pol raged. “He’d start a general war in the West if he tried that—and even set the Gods to wrangling. What is there about Alorns that makes them continually want to expand to the south? Those boundaries were established by the Gods themselves. I think it’s time for someone to put his foot down on Grodeg’s neck firmly. Go to Anheg immediately. Tell him everything and then tell him that I want to see him. I imagine that my father’s going to want to discuss the matter with him as well.”

“Anheg’s going to be furious with me, Polgara,” Islena faltered.

“I don’t think so,” Aunt Pol assured her. “As soon as he realizes that you’ve exposed Grodeg’s plan, he’ll probably be rather grateful. Let him think that you went along with Grodeg simply to get more information. That’s a perfectly respectable motive—and it’s the sort of thing a good wife would do.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Islena said, already sounding more sure of herself. “It would have been a brave thing to do, wouldn’t it?”

“Absolutely heroic, Islena,” Aunt Pol replied. “Now go to Anheg.”

“I will, Polgara.” There was the sound of quick, determined steps, and then a door closed.

“Garion, come back in here.” Aunt Pol’s voice was firm. He opened the door.

“You were listening?” It wasn’t really a question.

“Well—”

“We’re going to have to have a talk about that,” she told him. “But it doesn’t really matter this time. Go find your grandfather and tell him that I want to see him immediately. I don’t care what he’s doing. Bring him to me now.”

“But how do we know he can do anything?” Garion demanded. “I mean, if he’s lost his power—”

“There are many kinds of power, Garion. Sorcery is only one of them. Now go fetch him at once.”

“Yes, Aunt Pol,” Garion replied, already moving toward the door.

16

The High Priest of Belar was an imposing-looking man nearly seven feet tall. He had a long gray beard and burning eyes sunk deep in their sockets beneath bristling black eyebrows. He arrived from Val Alorn the following week after the seemingly endless negotiations had finally produced the official betrothal document. Accompanying him as a kind of retinue were two dozen hard-faced warriors dressed in bearskins.

“Bear-cultists,” Barak observed sourly to Garion and Silk as the three of them stood atop the wall of the Citadel, watching the High Priest and his men mounting the steps from the harbor in the bright spring sunshine.

“I didn’t say anything about bringing soldiers with him,” Garion objected indignantly.

“I imagine he took it upon himself,” Silk replied. “Grodeg’s very good at taking things upon himself.”

“I wonder how he’d like it if I threw him into a dungeon,” Garion said hotly. “Do I have a dungeon?”

“We could improvise one, I suppose.” Barak grinned at him. “Some nice damp cellar someplace. You might have to import some rats, though. The island’s reputed to be free of them.”

“You’re making fun of me,” Garion accused his friend, flushing slightly.

“Now you know I wouldn’t do that, Garion,” Barak replied, pulling at his beard.

“I’d talk with Belgarath before I had Grodeg clapped in irons, though,” Silk suggested. “The political implications might go a bit further than you intend. Whatever you do, don’t let Grodeg talk you into letting him leave any of his men behind. He’s been trying to get a foothold on the Isle of the Winds for twenty years now. Not even Brand has had the nerve to let him go that far.”

“Brand?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I wouldn’t want to say that Brand’s a cult member, but his sympathies certainly lie in that direction.”

Garion was shocked at that, and a little sick. “What do you think I ought to do?” he asked.

“Don’t try to play politics with these people,” Barak replied. “Grodeg’s here to conduct the official betrothal ceremony. Just let it go at that.”

“He’ll try to talk to me, though,” Garion fretted. “He’s going to try to make me lead an invasion of the southern kingdoms so that he can convert the Arends and Tolnedrans and Nyissans to the worship of Belar.”

“Where did you hear that?” Silk asked curiously.

“I’d rather not say,” Garion evaded.

“Does Belgarath know?”

Garion nodded. “Aunt Pol told him.”

Silk chewed thoughtfully on a fingernail. “Just be stupid,” he said finally.

“What?”

“Pretend to be a simple country bumpkin with no idea of what’s going on. Grodeg’s going to do everything he can to get you alone so he can wring concessions out of you. Just keep smiling and nodding foolishly, and every time he makes a proposal, send for Belgarath. Let him think that you can’t make a single decision on your own.”

“Won’t that make me seem—well—?”

“Do you really care what he thinks?”

“Well, not really, I guess, but ”

“It will drive him crazy,” Barak pointed out with a wicked grin. “He’ll think that you’re a complete idiot—a ripe plum ready for picking. But he’ll realize that if he wants you, he’ll have to fight Belgarath to get you. He’ll be tearing out his beard in frustration before he leaves.”

He turned and looked admiringly at Silk. “That’s really a terrible thing to do to a man like Grodeg, you know.”

Silk smirked. “Isn’t it though?”

The three of them stood grinning at each other and finally burst into laughter.

The official betrothal ceremony was conducted the following day. There had been a great deal of haggling about who should enter the Hall of the Rivan King first, but that difficulty had been overcome by Belgarath’s suggestion that Garion and Ce’Nedra could enter arm in arm. “This is all in preparation for a wedding, after all,” he had pointed out. “We might as well start off with a semblance at least of friendship.”

Garion was very nervous as the hour approached. His princess had been smoldering since the incident with the amulet, and he was almost certain that there was going to be trouble. But to his surprise, Ce’Nedra was radiant as the two of them waited alone together in a small antechamber while the official guests gathered in the Hall. Garion fidgeted a great deal and walked up and down, nervously adjusting his clothing, but Ce’Nedra sat rather demurely, patiently awaiting the trumpet fanfare which was to announce their entrance.

“Garion,” she said after a while.

“Yes?”

“Do you remember that time we bathed together in the Wood of the Dryads?”

“We did not bathe together,” Garion replied quickly, blushing to the roots of his hair.

“Well, very nearly.” She brushed his distinction aside. “Do you realize that Lady Polgara kept throwing us together like that all the time we were travelling? She knew that all this was going to happen, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” Garion admitted.

“So she kept shoving us at each other, hoping something might happen between us.”

Garion thought about that. “You’re probably right,” he concluded.

“She likes to arrange people’s lives for them.” Ce’Nedra sighed. “Look at all the opportunities we missed,” she said somewhat regretfully.

“Ce’Nedra!” Garion gasped, shocked at her suggestion.

She giggled a bit wickedly. Then she sighed again. “Now it’s all going to be dreadfully official—and probably not nearly as much fun.”

Garion’s face was flaming by now.

“Anyway,” she continued, “that time we bathed together—do you remember that I asked you if you’d like to kiss me?”

Garion nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“I never got that kiss, you know,” she said archly, standing up and crossing the small room to him, “and I think I’d like it now.”

She took hold of the front of his doublet firmly with both little hands. “You owe me a kiss, Belgarion of Riva, and a Tolnedran always collects what people owe her.” The look she directed up through her lashes at him smoldered dangerously.

Just outside, the trumpets blared out an extended fanfare.

“We’re supposed to go in now,” Garion sputtered a bit desperately.

“Let them wait,” she murmured, her arms sliding up around his neck.

Garion tried for a quick, perfunctory kiss, but his princess had other ideas. Her little arms were surprisingly strong, and her fingers locked in his hair. The kiss was lingering, and Garion’s knees began to tremble.

“There,” Ce’Nedra breathed when she finally released him.

“We’d better go in,” Garion suggested as the trumpets blared again.

“In a moment. Did you muss me?” She turned around so that he could inspect her.

“No,” he replied. “Everything still seems to be in order.”

She shook her head rather disapprovingly. “Try to do a little better next time,” she told him. “Otherwise I might start to think that you’re not taking me seriously.”

“I’m never going to understand you, Ce’Nedra.”

“I know,” she said with a mysterious little smile. Then she patted his cheek gently. “And I’m going to do everything I can to keep it that way. Shall we go in? We really shouldn’t keep our guests waiting, you know.”

“That’s what I said in the first place.”

“We were busy then,” she declared with a certain grand indifference. “Just a moment.” She carefully smoothed his hair. “There. That’s better. Now give me your arm.”

Garion extended his arm, and his princess laid her hand on it. Then he opened the door to the third chorus from the trumpets. They entered the Hall, and an excited buzz ran through the crowd assembled there. Taking his cue from Ce’Nedra, Garion moved at a stately pace, his face sober and regal-looking.

“Not quite so grim,” she whispered. “Smile just a little—and nod occasionally. It’s the thing to do.”

“If you say so,” he replied. “I really don’t know too much about this sort of thing.”

“You’ll be just fine,” she assured him.

Smiling and nodding to the spectators, the royal couple passed through the Hall to the chair that had been placed near the front for the princess. Garion held the chair for her, then bowed and mounted the dais to his throne. As always happened, the Orb of Aldur began to glow as soon as he sat down. This time, however, it seemed to have a faint pink cast to it.

The official betrothal ceremony began with a rolling invocation delivered in a thunderous voice by the High Priest of Belar. Grodeg took full advantage of the dramatics of the situation.

“Tiresome old windbag, isn’t he?” Belgarath murmured from his accustomed place at the right of the throne.

“What were you and Ce’Nedra doing in there?” Aunt Pol asked Garion.

“Nothing,” Garion replied, blushing furiously.

“Really? And it took you all that time? How extraordinary.”

Grodeg had begun reading the first clauses of the betrothal agreement. To Garion they sounded like pure gibberish. At various points Grodeg stopped his reading to look sternly at Garion.

“Does His Majesty, Belgarion of Riva, agree to this?” he demanded each time.

“I do,” Garion replied.

“Does Her Highness Ce’Nedra of the Tolnedran Empire agree to this?” Grodeg asked the princess.

Ce’Nedra responded in a clear voice, “I do.”

“How are you two getting along?” Belgarath asked, ignoring the droning voice of the clergyman.

“Who knows?” Garion answered helplessly. “I can’t tell from one minute to the next what she’s going to do.”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Aunt Pol told him.

“I don’t suppose you’d consider explaining that.”

“No, dear,” she replied with a smile as mysterious as Ce’Nedra’s had been.

“I didn’t really think so,” he grumbled.

Garion thought about Ce’Nedra’s rather open invitation to muss her during the interminable reading of the document which was firmly nailing down the remainder of his life, and the more he thought about it, the more he found the notion of a bit of polite mussing attractive. He rather hoped that the princess would linger after the ceremony and that they might go someplace private to discuss it. Following Grodeg’s pompous benediction, however, Ce’Nedra was immediately surrounded by all the younger girls in the court and swept away for some private celebration of their own. From all the giggling and wicked little glances cast in his direction, he concluded that the conversation at their little get-together was going to be very frank, probably naughty, and that the less he knew about it the better.

As Silk and Barak had predicted, the High Priest of Belar tried several times to speak to Garion privately. Each time, however, Garion put on a great show of ingenuousness and sent immediately for Belgarath. Grodeg left the island with his entire retinue the following day. To add a final insult to the whole matter, Garion insisted that he and Belgarath accompany the fuming ecclesiast to his ship to see him off—and to be certain that no Bear-cultist might inadvertently be left behind.

“Whose idea was all of this?” Belgarath inquired as he and Garion climbed the steps back to the Citadel.

“Silk and I worked it out,” Garion replied smugly.

“I might have known.”

“I thought things went quite well,” Garion congratulated himself.

“You’ve made yourself a dangerous enemy, you know.”

“We can handle him.”

“You’re getting to be very free with that ‘we,’ Garion,” Belgarath said disapprovingly.

“We’re all in this together, aren’t we, Grandfather?”

Belgarath looked at him helplessly for a moment and then began to laugh.

In the days that followed Grodeg’s departure, however, there was little occasion for laughter. Once the official ceremonies were over, the Alorn Kings, King Fulrach, and various advisers and generals got down to business. Their subject was war.

“The most recent reports I have from Cthol Murgos indicate that Taur Urgas is preparing to move the southern Murgos up from Rak Hagga as soon as the weather breaks on the eastern coast,” King Rhodar advised them.

“And the Nadraks?” King Anheg asked.

“They appear to be mobilizing, but there’s always a question about the Nadraks. They play their own game, so it takes a lot of Grolims to whip them into line. The Thulls just obey orders.”

“The Thulls don’t really concern anyone,” Brand observed. “The key to the whole situation is how many Malloreans are going to be able to take the field against us.”

“There’s a staging area for them being set up at Thull Zelik,” Rhodar reported, “but they’re also waiting for the weather to break in the Sea of the East.”

King Anheg frowned thoughtfully. “Malloreans are bad sailors,” he mused. “They won’t move until summer, and they’ll hug the north coast all the way to Thull Zelik. We need to get a fleet into the Sea of the East as soon as possible. If we can sink enough of their ships and drown enough of their soldiers, we might be able to keep them out of the war entirely. I think we should strike in force into Gar og Nadrak. Once we get into the forests, my men can build ships. We’ll sail down the River Cordu and out into the Sea of the East.”

“Thy plan hath merit, your Majesty,” Mandorallen approved, studying the large map hanging on the wall. “The Nadraks are fewest in number and farthest removed from the hordes of southern Cthol Murgos.”

King Rhodar shook his head stubbornly. “I know you want to get to the sea as quickly as possible, Anheg,” he objected, “but you’re committing me to a campaign in the Nadrak forest. I need open country to maneuver in. If we strike at the Thulls, we can cut directly across to the upper reaches of the River Mardu, and you can sail on down to the sea that way.”

“There aren’t that many trees in Mishrak ac Thull,” Anheg protested.

“Why build ships out of green lumber if you don’t have to?” Rhodar asked. “Why not sail up the Aldur and then portage across?”

“You want my men to portage ships up the eastern escarpment? Rhodar, be serious.”

“We have engineers, Anheg. They can devise ways to lift your ships to the top of the escarpment.”

Garion did not want to intrude his inexperience on the conference, but the question came out before he had time to think about it. “Have we decided where the final battle’s going to be?” he asked.

“Which final battle was that, Garion?” Rhodar asked politely.

“When we meet them head-on—like Vo Mimbre.”

“There won’t be a Vo Mimbre in this war,” Anheg told him. “Not if we can help it.”

“Vo Mimbre was a mistake, Garion,” Belgarath said quietly. “We all knew it, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it.”

“We won, didn’t we?”

“That was pure luck, and you can’t plan a campaign on the hope that you might get lucky. Nobody wanted the battle at Vo Mimbre—we didn’t, and Kal Torak didn’t, but nobody had any choice in the matter. We had to commit to battle before the second Angarak column arrived in the West. Kal Torak had been holding the southern Murgos and eastern Malloreans in reserve near Rak Hagga, and they started to march when he turned west from the siege of the Stronghold. If they’d been able to join forces with Kal Torak, there wouldn’t have been enough men in all the West to meet them, so we had to fight. Vo Mimbre was the least objectionable battlefield.”

“Why didn’t Kal Torak just wait until they arrived?” Garion asked.

“You can’t stop an army in unfriendly territory, King Belgarion,” Colonel Brendig explained. “You have to keep moving, or the local populace destroys all the food and starts coming out at night to cut up your people. You can lose half your army that way.”

“Kal Torak didn’t want the meeting at Vo Mimbre any more than we did,” Belgarath went on. “The column from Rak Hagga got caught in a spring blizzard in the mountains and bogged down for weeks. They finally had to turn back, and Torak was forced to fight at Vo Mimbre without any advantage of numbers, and nobody in his right mind goes into battle that way.”

“Thy force should be larger by a quarter than thine adversary’s,” Mandorallen agreed, “else the outcome must be in doubt.”

“By a third,” Barak corrected in a rumbling voice. “By half if you can arrange it.”

“Then all we’re going to do is spread out all over the eastern half of the continent and fight a whole series of little battles?” Garion demanded incredulously. “That could take years—decades. It could go on for a century.”

“If it has to,” Belgarath told him bluntly. “What did you expect, Garion? A short little ride in the sunshine, a nice easy fight, and then home before winter? I’m afraid it won’t be like that. You’d better get used to wearing armor and a sword, because you’ll probably be dressed that way for most of the rest of your life. This is likely to be a very long war.”

Garion’s illusions were crumbling rapidly.

The door to the council room opened, then, and Olban, Brand’s youngest son, entered and spoke with his father. The weather had turned blustery, and a spring storm was raking the island. Olban’s gray Rivan cloak was dripping as he entered.

Dismayed by the prospect of year after year of campaigning in the East, Garion distractedly stared at the puddle forming around Olban’s feet as the young man talked quietly with Brand. Then, out of habit, he lifted his eyes slightly to look at the hem of Olban’s cloak. There was a small tear on the left corner of the cloak, and a scrap of cloth seemed to be missing.

Garion stared at the telltale rip for a moment without realizing exactly what it was he saw. Then he went suddenly cold. With a slight start, he jerked his eyes up to look at Olban’s face. Brand’s youngest son was perhaps Garion’s own age, a bit shorter, but more muscular. His hair was pale blond, and his young face was serious, reflecting already the customary Rivan gravity. He seemed to be trying to avoid Garion’s eyes, but showed no other sign of nervousness. Once, however, he looked inadvertently at the young king and seemed to flinch slightly as guilt rose clearly into his eyes. Garion had found the man who had tried to kill him.

The conference continued after that, but Garion did not hear any more of it. What was he to do? Had Olban acted alone, or were others involved? Had Brand himself been a part of it? It was so difficult to know what a Rivan was thinking. He trusted Brand, but the big Warder’s connection with the Bear-cult gave a certain ambiguity to his loyalties. Could Grodeg be behind all this? Or perhaps a Grolim? Garion remembered the Earl of Jarvik, whose soul had been purchased by Asharak and who had mounted rebellion in Val Alorn. Had Olban fallen perhaps under the spell of the blood-red gold of Angarak as Jarvik had? But Riva was an island, the one place in the world where no Grolim could ever come. Garion discounted the possibility of bribery. In the first place, it was not in the Rivan character. In the second, Olban had not likely ever been in a situation to come into contact with a Grolim. Rather grimly, Garion decided on a course of action.

Lelldorin, of course, had to be kept out of it. The hot-headed young Asturian was incapable of the kind of delicate discretion that seemed to be called for. Lelldorin would reach for his sword, and the whole business would disintegrate rather rapidly after that.

When the conference broke up for the day late that afternoon, Garion went looking for Olban. He did not take a guard with him, but he did wear his sword.

As chance had it, it was in a dim corridor not unlike the one where the assassination attempt had taken place that the young king finally ran Brand’s youngest son down. Olban was coming along the passageway in one direction, and Garion was going the other. Olban’s face paled slightly when he saw his king, and he bowed deeply to hide his expression. Garion nodded as if intending to pass without speaking, but turned after the two of them had gone by each other. “Olban,” he said quietly.

Brand’s son turned, a look of dread on his face.

“I noticed that the corner of your cloak is torn,” Garion said in an almost neutral tone. “When you take it to have it mended, this might help.” He took the scrap of cloth out from under his doublet and offered it to the pale-faced young Rivan.

Olban stared wide-eyed at him, not moving.

“And as long as we’re at it,” Garion continued, “you might as well take this, too. I think you dropped it somewhere.” He reached inside his doublet again and took out the dagger with its bent point.

Olban started to tremble violently, then he suddenly dropped to his knees. “Please, your Majesty,” he begged, “let me kill myself. If my father finds out what I’ve done, it will break his heart.”

“Why did you try to kill me, Olban?” Garion asked.

“For love of my father,” Brand’s son confessed, tears welling up in his eyes. “He was ruler here in Riva until you came. Your arrival degraded him. I couldn’t bear that. Please, your Majesty, don’t have me dragged to the scaffold like a common criminal. Give me the dagger and I’ll bury it in my heart right here. Spare my father this last humiliation.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” Garion told him, “and get up. You look silly down there on your knees.”

“Your Majesty—” Olban began to protest.

“Oh, be still,” Garion told him irritably. “Let me think for a moment.” Dimly he began to see the glimmer of an idea. “All right,” he said finally, “this is what we’re going to do. You’re going to take this knife and this wool scrap down to the harbor and throw them into the sea, and then you’re going to go on about your life as if this had never happened.”

“Your Majesty—”

“I’m not finished. Neither you nor I will ever speak of this again. I don’t want any hysterical public confessions, and I absolutely forbid you to kill yourself. Do you understand me, Olban?”

Dumbly the young man nodded.

“I need your father’s help too much to have this come out or for him to be distracted by personal tragedy. This did not happen, and that’s an end of it. Take these and get out of my sight.” He shoved the knife and the wool scrap into Olban’s hands. He was suddenly infuriated. The weeks of looking nervously over his shoulder had all been so unnecessary—so useless. “Oh, one other thing, Olban,” he added as the stricken young Rivan turned to leave. “Don’t throw any more knives at me. If you want to fight, let me know, and we’ll go someplace private and cut each other to ribbons, if that’s what you want.”

Olban fled sobbing.

“Very well done, Belgarion,” the dry voice complimented him.

“Oh, shut up,” Garion said.

He slept very little that night. He had a few doubts about the wisdom of the course he had taken with Olban; but on the whole, he was satisfied that what he had done had been right. Olban’s act had been no more than an impulsive attempt to erase what he believed to be his father’s degradation. There had been no plot involved in it. Olban might resent Garion’s magnanimous gesture, but he would not throw any more daggers at his king’s back. What disturbed Garion’s sleep the most during that restless night was Belgarath’s bleak appraisal of the war upon which they were about to embark. He slept briefly on toward dawn and awoke from a dreadful nightmare with icy sweat standing out on his forehead. He had just seen himself, old and weary, leading a pitifully small army of ragged, gray-haired men into a battle they could not possibly win.

“There’s an alternative, of cours—if you’ve recovered enough from your bout of peevishness to listen,” the voice in his mind advised him as he sat bolt upright and trembling in his bed.

“What?” Garion answered aloud. “Oh, that—I’m sorry I spoke that way. I was irritated, that’s all.”

“In many ways you’re like Belgarath—remarkably—so his irritability seems to be hereditary.”

“It’s only natural, I suppose,” Garion conceded. “You said there was an alternative. An alternative to what?”

“To this war that’s giving you nightmares. Get dressed I want to show you something ”

Garion climbed out of his bed and hastily jerked on his clothing. “Where are we going?” he asked, still speaking aloud.

“It isn’t far,”

The room to which the other awareness directed him was musty and showed little evidence of use. The books and scrolls lining the shelves along its walls were dust-covered, and cobwebs draped the corners. Garion’s lone candle cast looming shadows that seemed to dance along the walls.

“On the top shelf,” the voice told him. “The scroll wrapped in yellow linen. Take it down.”

Garion climbed up on a chair and took down the scroll. “What is this?” he asked.

“The Mrin Codex, Take off the cover and start unrolling it. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

It took Garion a moment or two to get the knack of unrolling the bottom of the scroll with one hand and rolling up the top with the other.

“There,” the voice said. “That’s the passage. Read it.”

Garion struggled over the words. The script was spidery, and he still did not read very well. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he complained.

“The man who wrote it down was insane,” the voice apologized, “and he was an imbecile besides, but he was all I had to work with. Try it again but loud ”

Garion read: “Behold, it shall come to pass that in a certain moment, that which must be and that which must not be shall meet, and in that meeting shall be decided all that has gone before and all that will come after. Then will the Child of Light and the Child of Dark face each other in the broken tomb, and the stars will shudder and grow dim.” Garion’s voice trailed off. “It still doesn’t make any sense,” he objected.

“It’s a bit obscure,” the voice admitted. “As I said, the man who wrote it was insane. I put the ideas there, but he used his own words to express them. ”

“Who is the Child of Light?” Garion asked.

“You are for the moment at least. It changes.”

“Me?”

“Of course.”

“Then who’s this Child of Dark I’m supposed to meet?”

“Torak.”

“Torak!”

“I should have thought that would be obvious by now. I told you once about the two possible destinies coming together finally. You and Torak—the Child of Light and the Child of Dark—embody those destinies.”

“But Torak’s asleep.”

“Not any more. When you first put your hand on the Orb, the touch signalled his awakening. Even now he stirs on the edge of awareness, and his hand fumbles for the hilt of Cthrek-Goru, his black sword.”

Garion went very cold. “Are you trying to say that I’m supposed to fight Torak? Alone?”

“It’s going to happen, Belgarion. The universe itself rushes toward it. You can gather an army if you want, but your army—or Torak’s—won’t mean anything. As the Codex says, everything will be decided when you finally meet him. In the end, you’ll face each other alone. That’s what I meant by an alternative.”

“What you’re trying to say is that I’m just supposed to go off alone and find him and fight him?” Garion demanded incredulously.

“Approximately, yep ”

“I won’t do it.”

“That’s up to you. ”

Garion struggled with it. “If I take an army, I’ll just get a lot of people killed, and it won’t make any difference in the end anyway?”

“Not the least bit. In the end it will just be you, Torak, Cthrek-Goru, and the sword of the Rivan King. ”

“Don’t I have any choice at all?”

“None whatsoever. ”

“Do I have to go alone?” Garion asked plaintively.

“It doesn’t say that.”

“Could I take one or two people with me?”

“That’s your decision, Belgarion. Just don’t forget to take your sword.”

He thought about it for the rest of the day. In the end his choice was obvious. As evening settled over the gray city of Riva, he sent for Belgarath and Silk. There were some problems involved, he knew, but there was no one else he could rely on. Even if his power were diminished, Belgarath’s wisdom made Garion not even want to consider the undertaking without him. And Silk, of course, was just as essential. Garion reasoned that his own increasing talent for sorcery could see them through any difficulties if Belgarath should falter, and Silk could probably find ways to avoid most of the serious confrontations. Garion was confident that the three of them would be able to cope with whatever arose—until they found Torak. He didn’t want to think about what might happen then.

When the two of them arrived, the young king was staring out the window with haunted eyes.

“You sent for us?” Silk asked.

“I have to make a journey,” Garion replied in a scarcely audible voice.

“What’s bothering you?” Belgarath said. “You look a bit sick.”

“I just found out what it is that I’m supposed to do, Grandfather.”

“Who told you?”

“He did.”

Belgarath pursed his lips. “A bit premature, perhaps,” he suggested. “I was going to wait a while longer, but I have to assume he knows what he’s doing.”

“Who is this we’re talking about?” Silk asked.

“Garion has a periodic visitor,” the old man answered. “A rather special visitor.”

“That’s a singularly unenlightening response, old friend.”

“Are you sure you really want to know?”

“Yes,” Silk replied, “I think I do. I get the feeling that I’m going to be involved in it.”

“You’re aware of the Prophecy?”

“Naturally.”

“It appears that the Prophecy is a bit more than a statement about the future. It seems to be able to take a hand in things from time to time. It speaks to Garion on occasion.”

Silk’s eyes narrowed as he thought about that. “All right,” he said finally.

“You don’t seem surprised.”

The rat-faced little man laughed. “Belgarath, nothing about this whole thing surprises me any more.”

Belgarath turned back to Garion. “Exactly what did he tell you?”

“He showed me the Mrin Codex. Have you ever read it?”

“From end to end and backward and forward—even from side to side a couple of times. Which part did he show you?”

“The part about the meeting of the Child of Light and the Child of Dark.”

“Oh,” Belgarath said. “I was afraid it might have been that part. Did he explain it?”

Dumbly, Garion nodded.

“Well,” the old man said with a penetrating look, “now you know the worst. What are you going to do about it?”

“He gave me a couple of alternatives,” Garion said. “I can wait until we get an army together, and we can go off and fight back and forth with the Angaraks for generations. That’s one way, isn’t it?”

Belgarath nodded.

“Of course that will get millions of people killed for nothing, won’t it?”

The old man nodded again.

Garion drew in a deep breath. “Or,” he continued, “I can go off by myself and find Torak—wherever he is—and try to kill him.”

Silk whistled, his eyes widening.

“He said that I didn’t have to go alone,” Garion added hopefully. “I asked him about that.”

“Thanks,” Belgarath said dryly.

Silk sprawled in a nearby chair, rubbing thoughtfully at his pointed nose. He looked at Belgarath. “You know that Polgara would skin the both of us inch by inch if we let him go off alone, don’t you?”

Belgarath grunted.

“Where did you say Torak is?”

“Cthol Mishrak—in Mallorea.”

“I’ve never been there.”

“I have—a few times. It’s not a very attractive place.”

“Maybe time has improved it.”

“That’s not very likely.”

Silk shrugged. “Maybe we ought to go with him—show him the way, that sort of thing. It’s time I left Riva anyway. Some ugly rumors are starting to go around about me.”

“It is rather a good time of year for travelling,” Belgarath admitted, giving Garion a sly, sidelong glance.

Garion felt better already. He knew from their bantering tone that they had already made up their minds. He would not have to go in search of Torak alone. For now that was enough: there’d be time for worrying later. “All right,” he said, “what do we do?”

“We creep out of Riva very quietly,” Belgarath replied. “There’s nothing to be gained by getting into any long discussions with your .Aunt Pol about this.”

“The wisdom of ages,” Silk agreed fervently. “When do we start?” His ferret eyes were very bright.

“The sooner the better.” Belgarath shrugged.

“Did you have any plans for tonight?”

“Nothing I can’t postpone.”

“All right then. We’ll wait until everyone goes to bed, and then we’ll pick up Garion’s sword and get started.”

“Which way do we go?” Garion asked him.

“Sendaria first,” Belgarath replied, “and then across Drasnia to Gar og Nadrak. Then north to the archipelago that leads to Mallorea. It’s a long way to Cthol Mishrak and the tomb of the one-eyed God.”

“And then?”

“Then, Garion, we settle this once and for all.”