Polgara the Sorceress
David and Leigh Eddings

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work fo the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Voyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Previous Voyager paperback edition 1998, reprinted 11 times

First published in Great Britain by Voyager 1997

Copyright © David and Leigh Eddings 1997

The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007217106

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007375066

Version 2018-11-01

Dedication

And finally, after fifteen years, this book is dedicated to our readers. It’s been a long journey, hasn’t it? It’s been quite a project for us, and your patience and enthusiasm have helped us more than you can imagine. Thank you for your fortitude, and we hope that what we’ve done pleases you.

Warmly,

David & Leigh Eddings

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part One: Beldaran

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two: Father

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part Three: Vo Wacune

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part Four: Ontrose

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Part Five: Geran

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Part Six: Vo Mimbre

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Part Seven: Annath

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

By David Eddings

About the Publisher

Prologue

KAIL, THE RIVAN WARDER, objected strenuously when King Belgarion told him that he and his queen planned to make the journey to the northern end of the Vale of Aldur unattended, but Garion uncharacteristically put his foot down. ‘It’s a family gathering, Kail. Ce’Nedra and I don’t need a cluster of servants underfoot. They’d just be in the way.’

‘But it’s dangerous, your Majesty.’

‘I rather doubt that anything’ll turn up that I can’t handle, old friend,’ Garion told him. ‘We’re going alone.’ The Rivan Queen was a bit startled by the firmness in Garion’s voice.

Then there was the argument about fur. Queen Ce’Nedra was Tolnedran by birth and Dryad by heritage. Those backgrounds were both southern, and the notion of wearing animal skins made Ce’Nedra’s flesh creep. Garion, however, was at least partially Alorn, and he’d traveled extensively in the north in the winter-time. ‘You’re going to wear fur, Ce’Nedra,’ he adamantly told his tiny wife, ‘because if you don’t, we aren’t going anywhere until the weather warms up.’ Garion seldom delivered ultimatums to her, and Ce’Nedra was shrewd enough not to argue about the matter any further. She obediently dressed herself in Alorn fur garments, spoke at some length with the nurse who would oversee the royal children during her absence, and then she and her husband left the Isle of the Winds aboard the disreputable Captain Greldik’s dubious ship on the morning tide.

They purchased horses and supplies in Camaar and set out toward the east. The regularly spaced Tolnedran hostels along the highway to Muros provided adequate lodgings each night, but after Muros, they were largely on their own. The Rivan King, however, had spent a great deal of time living out in the open, and his little wife was forced to concede that he was adequate when the time came to set up camp.

The Rivan Queen was realistic enough to know just how ridiculous she looked while gathering firewood in those camps. The bulky fur garments she wore gave her a roly-poly appearance, her flaming red hair streamed down her back, and because of her size she could only carry a few sticks at a time. The unwanted image of a red-haired beaver trudging through the snow came to her quite often.

The snow was deep in the Sendarian mountains, and it seemed to Ce’Nedra that her feet would never be warm again. She could not give her husband the satisfaction of admitting that, however. This trek was her idea, after all, and she’d have sooner died than admit that it might have been a mistake.

Ce’Nedra was like that sometimes.

It was snowing lightly and was bitterly cold when they came down out of the mountains and rode south across the snowy plains of Algaria. Although it definitely went against the grain to confess it, even privately, Ce’Nedra was actually glad that her husband had been so insistent about fur clothing.

And then as a chill evening was settling over southern Algaria and when lowering clouds were spitting tiny pellets of snow, they topped a rise and saw the little valley on the northern edge of the Vale of Aldur where Poledra’s cottage and the surrounding outbuildings lay. The cottage had been there for eons, of course, but the barns and sheds were Durnik’s additions, and they gave the place the appearance of a Sendarian farmstead.

Ce’Nedra wasn’t really interested in comparative architecture at that point, however. All she really wanted to do was to get in out of the cold. ‘Do they know that we’re coming?’ she asked her husband, her breath steaming in the biting cold.

‘Yes,’ Garion replied. ‘I told Aunt Pol that we were on the way a couple of days ago.’

‘Sometimes you’re a very useful fellow to have around, your Majesty,’ Ce’Nedra smiled.

‘Your Majesty is too kind.’ His reply was a bit flippant.

‘Oh, Garion.’ They both laughed as they pushed on down the hill.

The cottage – they’d always called it that, though in actuality it was growing to be a fairly large house – nestled at the side of an ice-bound little stream, and the snow was piled up to the bottom of the windows. There was a kind of golden invitation about the way the soft lamplight spilled out across the snow, and the column of blue smoke from the central chimney rose straight up toward the threatening sky. The Rivan Queen definitely approved of that indication that warmth and comfort were no more than a quarter mile away.

And then the low door opened, and Durnik stepped out into the dooryard. ‘What kept you?’ he called up to them. ‘We were expecting you along about noon.’

‘We hit some deep snow,’ Garion called back. ‘It was slow going there for a while.’

‘Hurry on down, Garion. Let’s get Ce’Nedra in out of the cold.’ What a dear man he was!

Ce’Nedra and her husband rode into the snowy dooryard and swung down from their saddles.

‘Go inside, both of you,’ Durnik instructed. ‘I’ll see to your horses.’

‘I’ll help with that,’ Garion offered. ‘I can unsaddle a horse almost as well as you can, and I need to stretch my legs anyway.’ He took Ce’Nedra by the arm and guided her to the doorway. ‘I’ll be right back, Aunt Pol,’ he called inside. ‘I want to help Durnik with the horses.’

‘As you wish, dear,’ the Lady Polgara replied. Her voice was rich and filled with love. ‘Come in here, Ce’Nedra. Let’s get you warm.’

The Rivan Queen almost ran inside, hurled herself into the arms of Polgara the sorceress, and kissed her soundly.

‘Your nose is cold, Ce’Nedra,’ Polgara observed.

‘You should feel my feet, Aunt Pol,’ Ce’Nedra replied with a little laugh. ‘How can you stand the winters here?’

‘I grew up here, dear, remember? I’m used to the weather.’

Ce’Nedra looked around. ‘Where are the twins?’

They’re down for their afternoon nap. We’ll get them up for supper. Let’s get you out of those furs and over to the fireplace. As soon as you warm up a little, I’ve got water heating, and you can have a nice hot bath.’

‘Oh, yes!’ the Rivan Queen replied fervently.

Part of the difficulty with Alorn fur garments lies in the fact that they don’t have buttons, so they’re customarily tied on. Undoing frozen knots can be quite a chore, particularly if one’s fingers are stiff with cold. And so it was that Ce’Nedra was almost forced to simply stand in the center of the room with her arms outstretched while Polgara removed her outer garments. Then, once the furs were off, the Rivan Queen went to the fireplace and stretched her hands out to the crackling flames.

‘Not too close, dear,’ Polgara warned. ‘Don’t burn yourself. How does a nice hot cup of tea sound?’

‘Heavenly!’

After Ce’Nedra had drunk her tea and soaked in a tub of steaming water for about a half-hour, she actually began to feel warm again. Then she dressed in a plain gown and returned to the kitchen to help feed the twins. Polgara’s children were a year old now, and they’d begun to walk – although not very well. They also seemed to have some difficulty managing their spoons, and quite a bit of their supper ended up on the floor. The twins had flaxen, curly hair, and they were absolutely adorable. Their vocabulary was very limited – at least in any language Ce’Nedra could understand. They talked to each other extensively in some strange tongue, however.

They’re speaking “twin”‘, Polgara explained. ‘It’s not uncommon. Each set of twins develops its own private language. Beldaran and I spoke to each other in “twin” until we were about five. It used to drive poor uncle Beldin wild.’

Ce’Nedra looked around. ‘Where are Garion and Durnik?’

‘Durnik’s made some more improvements,’ Polgara replied. ‘I’d imagine he’s showing them off. He’s added several rooms at the back of the cottage, so at least you and Garion won’t have to sleep in the loft.’ She carefully wiped the chin of one of the twins. ‘Messy person,’ she chided gently. The child giggled. ‘Now then, what’s this all about, Ce’Nedra? Why did you make this trip in the dead of winter?’

‘Have you read Belgarath’s story yet?’ Ce’Nedra asked.

‘Yes. It was characteristically long-winded, I thought.’

‘You won’t get any argument from me about that. How could he possibly have written that much down in under a year?’

‘Father has certain advantages, Ce’Nedra. If he’d actually had to write it, it’d probably have taken him much, much longer.’

‘Maybe that’s why he left so many things out.’

‘I don’t exactly follow you, dear.’ Polgara gently wiped the face of the second twin and then set them both down on the floor.

‘For someone who pretends to be a professional storyteller, he certainly did a third-rate job.’

‘He more or less covered everything that happened, I thought.’

‘There are some awfully large gaps in that story, Aunt Pol.’

‘Father is seven thousand years old, Ce’Nedra. In that long a time there were bound to be periods when nothing was happening.’

‘He didn’t go into anything that happened to you, though. He didn’t say very much about those years you spent at Vo Wacune or what you did in Gar og Nadrak or any of those other places. I want to know what you did.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘I want the whole story, Aunt Pol. He left so much out.’

‘You’re as bad as Garion was. He always used to badger my father for more details every time the Old Wolf told him a story.’ Polgara broke off abruptly. ‘Away from the fireplace!’ she said sharply to the twins.

They giggled, but they did as they were told. Ce’Nedra gathered that it was a game of sorts. ‘Anyway,’ she picked up the thread of her thought, ‘Belgarath sent some letters when he had those last few chapters delivered to Riva. The letter he sent to me is what gave me the idea of coming here to talk with you. First he accused us all of getting together and bullying him into writing the history. He said that he knew there were gaps in the story, but he suggested that you could fill them in.’

‘How typical,’ Polgara murmured. ‘My father’s an expert at starting things and then tricking others into finishing them for him. Well, this time he’s out of luck. Forget it, Ce’Nedra. I don’t pretend to be a storyteller, and I’ve got better things to do with my time.’

‘But –’

‘No buts, dear. Now, go call Garion and Durnik in for supper.’

Ce’Nedra was shrewd enough not to raise the issue again, but a way around Polgara’s refusal had already begun to form in her devious little mind.

‘Garion, dear,’ she said when she and her husband were in bed later that night in the warm and comfortable darkness.

‘Yes, Ce’Nedra?’

‘You can reach out and talk to your grandfather, can’t you?’

‘I suppose so. Why?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to see him – and your grandmother? I mean, we’re this close anyway, and it’s not really very far from Belgarath’s tower to the cottage here, and they’d be terribly disappointed if we let this opportunity for a visit slip by, wouldn’t they?’

‘What are you up to, Ce’Nedra?’

‘Why must I always be “up to” something?’

‘You usually are.’

‘That’s not very nice, Garion. Isn’t it just possible that all I want is a family reunion?’

‘I’m sorry. Maybe I misjudged you.’

‘Well – actually, your Aunt Pol’s being a little stubborn about this. I’m going to need some help convincing her to write her story.’

‘Grandfather won’t help you. He already told you that in his letter.’

‘I’m not talking about help from him. I want to talk to Poledra. Aunt Pol will listen to her mother. Please, Garion.’ She said it in her most winsome and appealing tone.

‘All right. I’ll talk it over with Durnik and see what he thinks.’

‘Why don’t you let me talk with Durnik? I’m sure I can persuade him that it’s a good idea.’ She nuzzled at her husband’s neck affectionately. ‘I’m nice and warm now, Garion,’ she said invitingly.

‘Yes, I noticed that.’

‘Are you really very sleepy?’

‘Not that sleepy, dear,’ and he turned to embrace her.

This wouldn’t be terribly difficult, Ce’Nedra decided. She was an expert at getting her own way, and she was confident that she could get Garion and Durnik to agree with her plan. Poledra, on the other hand, might take a little more work.

Garion, as he usually did, slipped quietly out of bed before it was even light. The Rivan King had grown up on a farm, and farmers habitually rise early. Ce’Nedra decided that it might not be a bad idea to keep track of him for the next couple of days. A chance conversation between her husband and Durnik might disrupt her plan – Ce’Nedra deliberately avoided the word ‘scheme’. So she touched the fingertips of her right hand to Beldaran’s amulet and searched with her mind for Garion.

‘Oh, hush.’ It was Durnik’s voice, and it was peculiarly gentle. ‘It’s only me. Go back to sleep. I’ll feed you later.’

There was a muttering, some soft, grumbling sounds – birds of some kind, Ce’Nedra judged. Then they clucked a bit and settled back down again.

‘Do you always talk to them that way?’ It was Garion’s voice.

‘It keeps them from getting excited and flying off in the dark and hurting themselves,’ Durnik replied. ‘They insist on roosting in that tree right here in the dooryard, and I have to pass that tree every morning. They know me now, so I can usually persuade them to settle down again. Birds pick these things up fairly quickly. The deer take a little longer, and the rabbits are timid and very flighty.’

‘You feed them all, don’t you, Durnik?’

‘They live here, too, Garion, and this farm produces more food than Pol and I and the babies can possibly eat. Besides, that’s one of the reasons we’re here, isn’t it? The birds and the deer and the rabbits can look out for themselves in the summer, but winter’s a lean time, so I help them out a bit.’

He was such a good man! Ce’Nedra’s eyes almost filled with tears. Polgara was the pre-eminent woman in all the world, and she could have chosen any king or emperor for a husband and lived in a palace. She’d chosen a simple country blacksmith instead and lived on this remote farmstead. Now Ce’Nedra knew why.

As it turned out, Durnik was fairly easy to manipulate. Ce’Nedra’s suggestion of ‘a little family reunion, since we’re all here anyway’, brought him over to her side almost immediately. Durnik was too innocent to suspect ulterior motives in others. It was so easy that Ce’Nedra was almost ashamed of herself.

Garion was not nearly so innocent. He had lived with his wilful little Dryad wife for quite a while now, after all. With both Durnik and Ce’Nedra urging the reunion, though, he didn’t really have any choice. He did cast a few suspicious looks in Ce’Nedra’s direction before he sent his thought out to his grandfather, however.

Belgarath and Poledra arrived a day or so later, and the old man’s expression when he greeted the Rivan Queen clearly indicated that he knew that she was ‘up to something’. That didn’t really concern Ce’Nedra very much, though. What she was ‘up to’ didn’t involve Belgarath. She concentrated on Poledra instead.

It was several days before Ce’Nedra had the chance to get her husband’s grandmother off to one side for some serious talk, family reunions being what they are and all. Polgara’s twins, of course, were the center of everyone’s attention. The twins enjoyed that, and Ce’Nedra was patient. The right moment would come, she was sure of that, so she simply enjoyed the closeness of the peculiar family into which she had married and bided her time.

There was a strange quality about the tawny-haired Poledra that made Ce’Nedra a little hesitant about approaching her. Ce’Nedra had read Belgarath’s story several times, and she was fully aware of Poledra’s peculiar background. She frequently caught herself studying Belgarath’s wife, looking for wolfish traits. They were probably there, but Ce’Nedra was Tolnedran, and wolves are not so common in Tolnedra that she’d have recognized the traits even if they’d been more obvious. The thing that disturbed Ce’Nedra the most was the disconcertingly direct way Poledra had of looking at people. Cyradis had called Poledra ‘the Woman who Watches’, and the Seeress of Kell had been right on that score. Poledra’s golden eyes seemed quite capable of seeing through all of Ce’Nedra’s defences and concealments into that secret place where the Rivan Queen stored her motives. The tiny queen really didn’t want anybody snooping around in there.

Finally she screwed up her courage one morning and approached Polgara’s golden-eyed mother. Garion, Belgarath, and Durnik were outside, conducting one of their endless surveys of the farmstead, and Polgara was bathing the twins. ‘I need to ask a favor of you, Lady Poledra.’ Ce’Nedra was not certain of the proper form of address, so she fell back on a somewhat inappropriate usage.

‘I rather suspected you might,’ Poledra replied quite calmly. ‘You went to a great deal of trouble to arrange this gathering, and you’ve been watching me for the last several days. I was fairly certain that you’d eventually get to the point. What’s bothering you, child?’

‘Well – “bother” might not be the exact term,’ Ce’Nedra amended, averting her eyes slightly. Those penetrating golden eyes made her nervous. ‘There’s something I need from Polgara, and she’s being stubborn about it. You know how she can be sometimes.’

‘Yes. It’s a family trait.’

‘I didn’t say that very well, did I?’ Ce’Nedra apologized. ‘I love her, of course, but –’

‘What do you want from her? Don’t run in circles, Ce’Nedra. Get to the point.’

Ce’Nedra was not accustomed to being addressed so bluntly, but she chose not to take offence. She sidetracked slightly instead. ‘Have you read the history book your husband just finished writing?’ she asked.

‘I don’t read often,’ Poledra replied. ‘It’s hard on the eyes. Besides, he didn’t write it. He spoke it, and it just appeared on paper while he was talking. He cheats sometimes. I heard most of it while he was talking. It wasn’t too inaccurate.’

That’s what I’m getting at. He left quite a bit out, didn’t he?’

‘In places, yes.’

‘But your daughter could fill in those places, couldn’t she?’

‘Why would she want to do that?’

‘To complete the story.’

‘Stories aren’t really that important, Ce’Nedra. I’ve noticed that men-folk tell stories over their ale-cups to fill in the hours between supper and bedtime.’ Poledra’s look was amused. ‘Did you really come all this way just to get a story? Couldn’t you find anything better to do – have another baby, or something?’

Ce’Nedra changed direction again. ‘Oh, the story isn’t for me,’ she lied. ‘It’s for my son. Someday he’ll be the Rivan King.’

‘Yes, so I understand. I’ve been told about that custom. Peculiar customs should usually be observed, though.’

Ce’Nedra seized that advantage. ‘My son Geran will be a leader someday, and he needs to know where he is and how he got there. The story will tell him that.’

Poledra shrugged. ‘Why’s it so important? What happened yesterday – or a thousand years ago – isn’t going to change what happens tomorrow, is it?’

‘It might. Belgarath’s story hinted at the fact that things were going on that I didn’t even know were happening. There are two worlds out there running side by side. If Geran doesn’t know about both of them, he’ll make mistakes. That’s why I need Polgara’s story – for the sake of my children – and hers.’ Ce’Nedra bit off the term ‘puppies’ at the last instant. ‘Isn’t caring for our children the most important thing we do?’ Then a thought came to her. ‘You could tell the story, you know.’

‘Wolves don’t tell stories, Ce’Nedra. We’re too busy being wolves.’

‘Then it’s going to be up to Polgara. My son will need the rest of the story. The well-being of his people may depend on his knowing. I don’t know what Aldur has planned for Polgara’s children, but it’s very likely that they’ll need the story as well.’ Ce’Nedra was quite proud of that little twist. The appeal to Poledra’s innate sense of pack loyalty might very well be the one thing to turn the trick. ‘Will you help me persuade Polgara?’

Poledra’s golden eyes grew thoughtful. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.

That wasn’t exactly the firm commitment Ce’Nedra’d been hoping for, but Polgara brought out the twins at that point, so the Rivan Queen wasn’t able to pursue the matter further.

When Ce’Nedra awoke the following morning, Garion was already gone, as usual. Also, as usual, he’d neglected to pile more wood on the fire, and the room was decidedly cold. Shivering, Ce’Nedra got out of bed and went looking for warmth. She reasoned that if Garion was up, Durnik would be as well, so she went directly to Polgara’s bedroom and tapped lightly on the door.

‘Yes, Ce’Nedra,’ Aunt Pol replied from inside. She always seemed to know who was at her door.

‘May I come in?’ Ce’Nedra asked. ‘Garion let the fire go out, and it’s freezing in our room.’

‘Of course, dear,’ Aunt Pol replied.

Ce’Nedra opened the door, hurried to the bed, and crawled under the covers with Aunt Pol and the babies. ‘He always does that,’ she complained. ‘He’s so busy trying to sneak away that he doesn’t even think about putting more wood on the fire.’

‘He doesn’t want to wake you, dear.’

‘I can always go back to sleep if I want, and I hate waking up in a cold room.’ She gathered one of the twins in her arms and cuddled the little child close. Ce’Nedra was a mother herself, so she was very good at cuddling. She realized that she really missed her own children. She began to have some second thoughts about the wisdom of a journey in the dead of winter based on nothing more than a whim.

The Rivan Queen and her husband’s aunt talked about various unimportant things for a while, and then the door opened and Polgara’s mother came in carrying a tray with three cups of steaming tea on it. ‘Good morning, mother,’ Polgara said.

‘Not too bad,’ Poledra replied. ‘A little cold, though.’ Poledra was so literal sometimes.

‘What are the men-folk up to?’ Aunt Pol asked.

‘Garion and Durnik are out feeding the birds and animals,’ Poledra said. ‘He’s still asleep.’ Poledra almost never spoke her husband’s name. She set her tray down on the small table near the fireplace. ‘I think we need to talk,’ she said. She came to the bed, took up the twins, and deposited them back in the curiously constructed double cradle that Durnik had built for his children. Then she handed Polgara and Ce’Nedra each a cup of tea, took the remaining one up herself, and sat in the chair by the fire.

‘What’s so important, mother?’ Polgara asked.

Poledra pointed one finger at Ce’Nedra. ‘She talked with me yesterday,’ she said, ‘and I think she’s got a point we should consider.’

‘Oh?’

‘She said that her son – and his sons – will be leading the Rivans someday, and there are things they’ll need to know. The well-being of the Rivans might depend on their knowing. That’s a leader’s first responsibility, isn’t it? – whether he’s leading people or wolves.’

Ce’Nedra silently gloated. Her thrown-together arguments the previous morning had evidently brought Poledra over to her side.

‘Where are we going with this, mother?’ Polgara asked.

‘You have a responsibility as well, Polgara – to the young,’ her mother replied. ‘That’s our first duty. The Master set you a task, and you haven’t finished it yet.’

Polgara gave Ce’Nedra a hard look.

‘I didn’t do anything, Aunt Pol,’ Ce’Nedra said with feigned innocence. ‘I just asked for your mother’s advice, that’s all.’

The two sets of eyes – one set tawny yellow, the other deep blue – fixed themselves on her.

Ce’Nedra actually blushed.

‘She wants something, Polgara,’ Poledra said. ‘Give it to her. It won’t hurt you, and it’s still a part of the task you freely accepted. We wolves rely on our instincts; humans need instruction. You’ve spent most of your life caring for the young – and instructing them – so you know what’s required. Just set down what really happened and be done with it.’

‘Not all of it, certainly!’ Polgara sounded shocked. ‘Some of those things were too private.’

Poledra actually laughed. ‘You still have a great deal to learn, my daughter. Don’t you know by now that there’s no such thing as privacy among wolves? We share everything. The information may be useful to the leader of the Rivans someday – and to your own children as well – so let’s be sure they have what they need. Just do it, Polgara. You know better than to argue with me.’

Polgara sighed. ‘Yes, mother,’ she replied submissively.

Ce’Nedra underwent a kind of epiphany at that point, and she didn’t entirely like it. Polgara the Sorceress was the pre-eminent woman in the world. She had titles beyond counting, and the whole world bowed to her, but in some mysterious way, she was still a wolf, and when the dominant female – her mother in this case – gave an order, she automatically obeyed. Ce’Nedra’s own heritage was mixed – part Borune and part Dryad. She’d argued extensively with her father, the Emperor of Tolnedra, but when Xantha, Queen of the Dryads, spoke, Ce’Nedra might complain a bit, but she instinctively obeyed. It was built into her. She began to look at Polgara in a slightly different way, and by extension, at herself also in a new fashion.

‘It’s a start,’ Poledra said cryptically. ‘Now then, daughter,’ she said to Polgara, ‘it won’t be all that difficult. I’ll talk with him, and he’ll show you how to do it without all that foolishness with quill-pens and ink. It’s your obligation, so stop complaining.’

‘It shall be as my mother wishes,’ Polgara replied.

‘Well, then,’ Poledra said, ‘now that that’s settled, would you ladies like to have another cup of tea?’

Polgara and Ce’Nedra exchanged a quick glance. ‘I suppose we might as well,’ Polgara sighed.

Part One: Beldaran

Chapter 1

This was not my idea. I want that clearly understood right at the outset. The notion that any one person can describe ‘what really happened’ is an absurdity. If ten – or a hundred – people witness an event, there will be ten – or a hundred – different versions of what took place. What we see and how we interpret it depends entirely upon our individual past experience. My mother, however, has insisted that I undertake this ridiculous chore, and I will, as always, do as she tells me to do.

The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more I’ve come to realize that when Ce’Nedra first broached the subject to me, and later to my mother, her obviously specious argument about ‘the well-being of the young’ actually had more merit than that devious little girl realized. One day Geran will be the Rivan King and the Guardian of the Orb, and over the centuries, I’ve found that people with at least a nodding acquaintance with true history make the best rulers. At least they don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

If all Geran and his sons really needed to rule the Rivans were to be a flat recounting of the deeds of assorted rulers of assorted kingdoms in ages past, the tiresome repetition of the ‘and then, and then, and then’ that so delights the stodgy members of the Tolnedran Historical Society would be more than sufficient.

As my daughter-in-law so cunningly pointed out, however, the ‘and then’s’ of those Tolnedran scholars deal with only a part of the world. There’s another world out there, and things happen in that other world that Tolnedrans are constitutionally incapable of comprehending. Ultimately it will be this unseen world that the Rivan King must know if he is to properly perform his task.

Even so, I could have devoutly maintained that my father’s long-winded version of the history of our peculiar world had already filled in that obvious gap. I even went so far as to re-read father’s tedious story, trying very hard to prove to myself – and to my mother – that I’d really have nothing to add. Soon father’s glaring omissions began to leap off the page at me. The old fraud hadn’t told the whole story, and mother knew it.

In father’s defense, however, I’ll admit that there were events that took place when he wasn’t present and others during which he didn’t fully understand what was really happening. Moreover, some of the omissions which so irritated me as I read had their origin in his desire to compress seven thousand years of history into something of manageable length I’ll forgive him those lapses, but couldn’t he at least have gotten names and dates right? For the sake of keeping peace in the family, I’ll gloss over his imperfect memory of just who said what in any given conversation. Human memory – and that’s assuming that my father’s human – is never really all that exact, I suppose. Why don’t we just say that father and I remember things a little differently and let it go at that, shall we? Try to keep that in mind as you go along. Don’t waste your time – and mine – by pointing out assorted variations.

The more I read, the more I came to realize that things I know and father doesn’t would be essential parts of Geran’s education. Moreover, a probably hereditary enthusiasm for a more complete story began to come over me. I tried to fight it, but it soon conquered me. I discovered that I actually wanted to tell my side of the story.

I have a few suspicions about the origins of my change of heart, but I don’t think this is the place to air them.

The central fact of my early life was my sister Beldaran. We were twins, and in some respects even closer than twins. To this very day we’re still not apart. Beldaran, dead these three thousand years and more, is still very much a part of me. I grieve for her every day. That might help to explain why I sometimes appear somber and withdrawn. Father’s narrative makes some issue of the fact that I seldom smile. What’s there to smile about, Old Wolf?

As father pointed out, I’ve read extensively, and I’ve noticed that biographies normally begin at birth. Beldaran and I, however, began just a bit earlier than that. For reasons of her own, mother arranged it that way.

So now, why don’t we get started?

It was warm and dark, and we floated in absolute contentment, listening to the sound of mother’s heart and the rush of her blood through her veins as her body nourished us. That’s my first memory – that and mother’s thought gently saying to us, ‘Wake up.’

We’ve made no secret of mother’s origins. What isn’t widely known is the fact that the Master summoned her, just as he summoned all the rest of us. She’s as much Aldur’s disciple as any of us are. We all serve him in our own peculiar ways. Mother, however, was not born human, and she perceived rather early in her pregnancy that Beldaran and I had none of those instincts that are inborn in wolves. I’ve since learned that this caused her much concern, and she consulted with the Master at some length about it, and her suggested solution was eminently practical. Since Beldaran and I had no instincts, mother proposed to the Master that she might begin our education while we were still enwombed. I think her suggestion might have startled Aldur, but he quickly saw its virtue. And so it was that mother took steps to make certain that my sister and I had certain necessary information – even before we were born.

During the course of a normal human pregnancy, the unborn lives in a world consisting entirely of physical sensation. Beldaran and I, however, were gently guided somewhat further. My father rather arrogantly states that he began my education after Beldaran’s wedding, but that’s hardly accurate. Did he really think that I was a vegetable before that? My education – and Beldaran’s – began before we ever saw the light of day.

Father’s approach to education is disputational. As first disciple, he’d been obliged to oversee the early education of my various uncles. He forced them to think and to argue as a means of guiding them along the thorny path to independent thought – although he sometimes carried it to extremes. Mother was born wolf, and her approach is more elemental. Wolves are pack-animals, and they don’t think independently. Mother simply told Beldaran and me, ‘This is the way it is. This is the way it always has been, and always will be.’ Father teaches you to question; mother teaches you to accept. It’s an interesting variation.

At first, Beldaran and I were identical twins and as close as that term implies. When mother’s thought woke us, however, she rather carefully began to separate us. I received certain instruction that Beldaran didn’t, and she received lessons that I didn’t. I think I felt that wrench more keenly than Beldaran did. She knew her purpose; I spent years groping for mine.

The separation was very painful for me. I seem to remember reaching out to my sister and saying to her in our own private language, ‘You’re so far away now.’ Actually, of course, she wasn’t. We were both still confined in that small, warm place beneath mother’s heart, but always before our minds had been linked, and now they were inexorably moving apart. If you think about it a bit, I’m sure you’ll understand.

After we awoke, mother’s thought was with us continually. The sound of it was as warm and comforting as the place where we floated, but the place nourished only our bodies. Mother’s thought nourished our minds – with those subtle variations I previously mentioned. I suspect that what I was and what I have become is the result of that womb-dark period in my life when Beldaran and I floated in perfect sisterhood – until mother’s thought began to separate us.

And then in time there was another thought as well. Mother had prepared us for that intrusion upon what had been a very private little world. After my sister and I had become more fully aware and conscious of our separation and some of the reasons for it, Aldur’s thought joined with hers to continue our education. He patiently explained to us right at the outset why certain alterations were going to be necessary. My sister and I had been identical. Aldur changed that, and most of the alterations were directed at me. Some of the changes were physical – the darkening of my hair, for example – and others were mental. Mother had begun that mental division, and Aldur refined it. Beldaran and I were no longer one. We were two. Beldaran’s reaction to our further separation was one of gentle regret. Mine was one of anger.

I rather suspect that my anger may have been a reflection of mother’s reaction when my vagrant father and a group of Alorns chose to slip away so that they could go off to Mallorea to retrieve the Orb Torak had stolen from the Master. I now fully understand why it was necessary and why father had no choice – and so does mother, I think. But at the time she was absolutely infuriated by what, in the society of wolves, was an unnatural desertion. My somewhat peculiar relationship with my father during my childhood quite probably derived from my perception of mother’s fury. Beldaran was untouched by it, since mother wisely chose to shield her from that rage.

A vagrant and somewhat disturbing thought just occurred to me. As I mentioned earlier, father’s educational technique involves questioning and argumentation, and I was probably his star pupil. Mother teaches acceptance, and Beldaran received the full benefit of that counsel. In a strange sort of way this would indicate that I’m my father’s true daughter, and Beldaran was mother’s.

All right, Old Wolf. Don’t gloat. Wisdom eventually comes to all of us. Someday it might even be your turn.

Mother and the Master gently told my sister and me that once we were born, mother would have to leave us in the care of others so that she could pursue a necessary task. We were assured that we would be well cared for, and, moreover, that mother’s thought would be with us more or less continually, even as it had been while we were still enwombed. We accepted that, though the notion of physical separation was a little frightening. The important thing in our lives from the moment that our awareness had awakened, though, had been the presence of mother’s thought, and as long as that would still be with us we were sure that we’d be all right.

For a number of reasons it was necessary for me to be born first. Aldur’s alterations of my mind and my personality had made me more adventurous than Beldaran anyway, so it was natural for me to take the lead, I suppose.

It was actually an easy birth, but the light hurt my eyes right at first, and the further separation from my sister was extremely painful. In time, however, she joined me, and all was well again. Mother’s thought – and Aldur’s – were still with us, and so we drowsed together in perfect contentment.

I’m assuming here that most of you have read my father’s ‘History of the World’. In that occasionally pompous monologue he frequently mentioned ‘The humorous old fellow in the rickety cart’. It wasn’t long after Beldaran and I were born that he paid us a call. Although his thought had been with us for months, that was the first time we actually saw the Master. He communed with us for a time, and when I looked around, a sudden panic came over me.

Mother was gone.

‘It’s all right, Polgara,’ mother’s thought came to me. ‘This is necessary. The Master has summoned one who’ll care for you and your sister. That one is short and twisted and ugly, but his heart’s good. It’ll be necessary to deceive him, I’m afraid. He must believe that I’m no longer alive. No one – except you and Beldaran – must know that it’s not true. The one who sired you will return soon, but he still has far to go. He’ll travel more quickly without the distraction of my presence.’

And that’s how uncle Beldin entered our lives. I can’t be entirely sure what the Master told him, but he wept a great deal during those first few days. After he got his emotions under control, he made a few tentative efforts to communicate with my sister and me. To be honest about it, he was woefully inept right at first, but the Master guided him, and in time he grew more proficient.

Our lives – my sister’s and mine – were growing more crowded. We slept a great deal at first. Uncle Beldin was wise enough to put us in the same cradle, and as long as we were together, everything was all right. Mother’s thought was still with us – and Aldur’s – and now uncle Beldin’s, and we were still content.

My sister and I had no real sense of the passage of time during our first few months. Sometimes it was light and sometimes dark. Beldin was always with us, though, and we were together, so time didn’t really mean very much to us.

Then, after what was probably weeks, there were two others as well, and their thought joined with the ones which were already familiar. Our other two uncles, Beltira and Belkira, had entered our lives.

I’ve never fully understood why people have so much difficulty telling Beltira and Belkira apart. To me, they’ve always been separate and distinct from each other, but I’m a twin myself, so I’m probably a little more sensitive to these variations.

Beldaran and I had been born in midwinter, and uncle Beldin had moved us to his own tower not long afterward, and it was in that tower that we spent our childhood. It was about midsummer of our first year when father finally returned to the Vale. Beldaran and I were only about six months old at the time, but we both recognized him immediately. Mother’s thought had placed his image in our minds before we were ever born. The memory of mother’s anger was still very strong in my mind when Beldin lifted me from my cradle and handed me to the vagabond who’d sired me. I wasn’t particularly impressed with him, to be honest about it, but that prejudice may have been the result of mother’s bitterness about the way he’d deserted her. Then he laid his hand on my head in some ancient ritual of benediction, and the rest of my mind suddenly came awake as his thought came flooding in on me. I could feel the power coming from his hand, and I seized it eagerly. This was why I’d been separated from Beldaran! At last I realized the significance of that separation. She was to be the vessel of love; I was to be the vessel of power!

The mind is limitless in certain ways, and so my father was probably unaware of just how much I took from him in that single instant when his hand touched my head. I’m fairly sure that he still doesn’t fully understand just exactly what passed from him to me in that instant What I took from him in no way diminished him, but it increased me a hundred-fold.

Then he took up Beldaran, and my fury also increased a hundred-fold. How dared this traitor touch my sister? Father and I were not getting off to a good start.

And then came the time of his madness. I was still not familiar enough with human speech to fully understand what uncle Beldin told him that drove him to that madness, but mother’s thought assured me that he’d survive it – eventually.

Looking back now, I realize that it was absolutely essential for mother and father to be separated. I didn’t understand at the time, but mother’s thought had taught me that acceptance is more important than understanding.

During the time of my father’s insanity, my uncles frequently took my sister to visit him, and that didn’t improve my opinion of him. He became in my eyes a usurper, a vile man out to steal Beldaran’s affection away from me. Jealousy isn’t a particularly attractive emotion, even though it’s very natural in children, so I won’t dwell here on exactly how I felt each time my uncles took Beldaran away from me to visit that frothing madman chained to his bed in that tower of his. I remember, though, that I protested vociferously – at the top of my lungs – whenever they took Beldaran away.

And that was when Beldin introduced me to ‘the puzzle’. I’ve always thought of it as that. In a peculiar sort of way ‘the puzzle’ almost came to take on a life of its own for me. I can’t be entirely certain how Beldin managed it, but ‘the puzzle’ was a gnarled and twisted root of some low-growing shrub – heather, perhaps – and each time I took it up to study it, it seemed to change. I could quite clearly see one end of it, but I could never find the other. I think that ‘the puzzle’ helped to shape my conception of the world and of life itself. We know where one end is – the beginning – but we can never quite see the other. It provided me with endless hours of entertainment, though, and that gave uncle Beldin a chance to get some rest.

I was studying ‘the puzzle’ when father came to uncle Beldin’s tower to say his goodbyes. Beldaran and I were perhaps a year and a half old – or maybe a little younger – when he came to the tower and kissed Beldaran. I felt that usual surge of jealousy, but I kept my eyes firmly fixed on ‘the puzzle’, hoping he’d go away.

And then he picked me up, tearing my attention away from what I was working on. I tried to get away from him, but he was stronger than I was. I was hardly more than a baby, after all, although I felt much older. ‘Stop that,’ he told me, and his tone seemed irritable. ‘You may not care much for the idea, Pol, but I’m your father, and you’re stuck with me.’ And then he kissed me, which he’d never done before. For a moment – only a moment – I felt his pain, and my heart softened toward him.

‘No,’ mother’s thought came to me, ‘not yet.’ At the time, I thought it was because she was still very angry with him and that I was to be the vessel of her anger. I know now I was mistaken. Wolves simply don’t waste time being angry. My father’s remorse and sorrow had not yet run their course, and the Master still had many tasks for him. Until he had expiated what he felt to be his guilt, he’d be incapable of those tasks. My misunderstanding of mother’s meaning led me to do something I probably shouldn’t have done. I struck out at him with ‘the puzzle’.

‘Spirited, isn’t she?’ he murmured to uncle Beldin. Then he put me down, gave me a little pat on the bottom, which I scarcely felt, and told me to mind my manners.

I certainly wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of thinking that his chastisement in any way had made me change my opinion of him, so I turned, still holding ‘the puzzle’ like a club, and glared at him.

‘Be well, Polgara,’ he told me in the gentlest way imaginable. ‘Now go play.’

He probably still doesn’t realize it, but I almost loved him in that single instant – almost, but not quite. The love came later, and it took years.

It was not long after that that he turned and left the Vale, and I didn’t see him again for quite a number of years.

Chapter 2

Nothing that ever happens is so unimportant that it doesn’t change things, and father’s intrusion into our lives could hardly be called unimportant. This time the change was in my sister Beldaran, and I didn’t like it. Until my father returned from his excursion to Mallorea, Beldaran was almost exclusively mine. Father’s return altered that. Now her thoughts, which had previously been devoted to me, became divided. She thought often of that beer-soaked old rogue, and I resented it bitterly.

Beldaran, even when we were hardly more than babies, was obsessed with tidiness, and my aggressive indifference to my appearance upset her greatly.

‘Can’t you at least comb your hair, Pol?’ she demanded one evening, speaking in ‘twin’, a private language that had grown quite naturally between us almost from the time we were in the cradle.

‘What for? It’s just a waste of time.’

‘You look awful.’

‘Who cares what I look like?’

‘I do. Sit down and I’ll fix it for you.’

And so I sat in a chair and let my sister fuss with my hair. She was very serious about it, her blue eyes intent and her still-chubby little fingers very busy. Her efforts were wasted, of course, since nobody’s hair stays combed for very long; but as long as it amused her, I was willing to submit to her attentions. I’ll admit that I rather enjoyed what became an almost nightly ritual. At least when she was busy with my hair she was paying attention to me instead of brooding about our father.

In a peculiar way my resentment may have shaped my entire life. Each time Beldaran’s eyes grew misty and distant, I knew that she was brooding about our father, and I could not bear the separation implicit in that vague stare. That’s probably why I took to wandering almost as soon as I could walk. I had to get away from the melancholy vacancy in my sister’s eyes.

It almost drove uncle Beldin to the brink of insanity, I’m afraid. He could not devise any latch on the gate that blocked the top of the stairs in his tower that I couldn’t outwit. Uncle Beldin’s fingers have always been large and gnarled, and his latches were bulky and rather crude. My fingers were small and very nimble, and I could undo his devices in a matter of minutes whenever the urge to wander came over me. I was – still am, I suppose – of an independent nature, and nobody is ever going to tell me what to do.

Have you noticed that, father? I thought I noticed you noticing.

The first few times I made good my escape, uncle Beldin frantically searched for me and scolded me at some length when he finally found me. I’m a little ashamed to admit that after a while it even became a kind of game. I’d wait until he was deeply engrossed in something, quickly unhook his gate, and then scamper down his stairs. Then I’d find someplace to hide where I could watch his desperate search. In time I think he began to enjoy our little entertainment as well, because his scoldings grew progressively less vehement. I guess that after the first several times he came to realize that there was nothing he could do to stop my excursions into the outside world and that I wouldn’t stray too far from the foot of his tower.

My adventuring served a number of purposes. At first it was only to escape my sister’s maudlin ruminations about father. Then it became a game during which I tormented poor uncle Beldin by seeking out hiding places. Ultimately, though it’s very unattractive, it was a way to get someone to pay attention to me.

As the game continued, I grew fonder and fonder of the ugly, gnarled dwarf who’d become my surrogate parent. Any form of emotionalism embarrasses uncle Beldin, but I think I’ll say this anyway. ‘I love you, you dirty, mangy little man, and no amount of foul temper or bad language will ever change that.’

If you ever read this, uncle, I’m sure that will offend you. Well, isn’t that just too bad?

It’s easy for me to come up with all sorts of exotic excuses for the things I did during my childhood, but to put it very bluntly I was totally convinced that I was ugly. Beldaran and I were twins, and we should have been identical. The Master changed that, however. Beldaran was blonde, and my hair was dark. Our features were similar, but we were not mirror images of each other. There were some subtle variations – many of them existing only in my own imagination, I’m sure. Moreover, my excursions outside uncle Beldin’s tower had exposed my skin to the sun. Beldaran and I both had very fair skin, so I didn’t immediately develop that healthy, glowing tan so admired in some quarters. I burned instead, and then I peeled. I frequently resembled a snake or lizard in molt. Beldaran remained indoors, and her skin was like alabaster. The comparison was not very flattering.

Then there was the accursed white lock in my hair which father’s first touch had bestowed upon me. How I hated that leprous lock of hair! Once, in a fit of irritation, I even tried to cut it short with a knife. It was a very sharp knife, but it wasn’t that sharp. The lock resisted all my sawing and hacking. I did manage to dull the knife, however. No, the knife wasn’t defective. It left a very nice cut on my left thumb as my efforts to excise the hideous lock grew more frantic.

So I gave up. Since I was destined to be ugly, I saw no point in paying any attention to my appearance. Bathing was a waste of time, and combing merely accentuated the contrast between the lock and the rest of my hair. I fell down frequently because I was awkward at that age, and my bony knees and elbows were usually skinned. My habit of picking at the resulting scabs left long streaks of dried blood on my lower legs and forearms, and I chewed my fingernails almost continually.

To put it rather simply, I was a mess – and I didn’t really care.

I gave vent to my resentment in a number of ways. There were those tiresome periods when I refused to answer when Beldaran talked to me, and my infantile practice of waiting until she was asleep at night and then neatly rolling over in our bed to pull all the covers off her. That one was always good for at least a half-hour fight. I discarded it, however, after uncle Beldin threatened to have Beltira and Belkira build another bed so that he could make us sleep apart. I was resentful about my sister’s preoccupation with our father, but not that resentful.

As I grew older, my field of exploration expanded. I guess uncle Beldin had grown tired of trying to find me after I’d escaped from his tower – either that or the Master had advised him to let me wander. The growth of my independence was evidently important.

I think I was about six or so when I finally discovered the Tree which stands in the middle of the Vale. My family has a peculiar attachment to that Tree. When my father first came to the Vale, it was the Tree that held him in stasis until the weather turned bad on him. Ce’Nedra, who is a Dryad, after all, was absolutely entranced by it, and she spent hours communing with it Garion has never spoken of his reaction to the Tree, but Garion had other things on his mind the first time he saw it. When Eriond was quite young, he and Horse made a special trip just to visit with it.

It surprised me the first time I saw it. I could not believe that anything alive could be that huge. I remember the day very well. It was early spring, and a blustery wind was bending the grass in long waves atop the knolls in the Vale and scudding dirty grey clouds across the sky. I felt very good and oddly free. I was quite some distance from uncle Beldin’s tower when I topped a long, grassy rise and saw the Tree standing in solitary immensity in the next valley. I’ll not cast any unfounded accusations here, but it just so happened that a break in the clouds permitted a single shaft of sunlight to fall like a golden column upon the Tree.

That got my immediate attention.

The Tree’s trunk was much larger than uncle Beldin’s tower, its branches reached hundreds of feet into the air, and its lateral limbs shaded whole acres. I stared at it in amazement for a long time, and then I very clearly heard – or felt – it calling to me.

I somewhat hesitantly descended the hill in response. I was wary about that strange summons. The bushes didn’t talk to me, and neither did the grass. My as yet unformed mind automatically suspected anything out of the ordinary.

When at last I entered the shade of those wide-spread branches, a strange sort of warm glowing peace came over me and erased my trepidation. Somehow I knew that the Tree meant me no harm. I walked quite resolutely toward that vast, gnarled trunk.

And then I put forth my hand and touched it.

And that was my second awakening. The first had come when father had laid his hand upon my head in benediction, but in some ways this awakening was more profound.

The Tree told me – although ‘told’ is not precisely accurate, since the Tree does not exactly speak – that it was – is, I suppose – the oldest living thing in the entire world. Ages unnumbered have nourished it, and it stands in absolute serenity in the center of the Vale, shedding years like drops of rain from its wide-spread leaves. Since it pre-dates the rest of us, and it’s alive, we’re all in some peculiar way its children. The first lesson it taught me – the first lesson it teaches everyone who touches it – was about the nature of time. Time, the slow, measured passage of years, is not exactly what we think it is. Humans tend to break time up into manageable pieces – night and day, the turning of the seasons, the passage of years, centuries, eons – but in actuality time is all one piece, a river flowing endlessly from the beginning toward some incomprehensible goal. The Tree gently guided my infant understanding through that extremely difficult concept.

I think that had I not encountered the Tree exactly when I did, I should never have grasped the meaning of my unusual life-span. Slowly, with my hands still on the Tree’s rough bark, I came to understand that I would live for as long as necessary. The Tree was not very specific about the nature of the tasks which lay before me, but it did suggest that those tasks would take me a very long time.

And then I did hear a voice – several, actually. The meaning of what they were saying was totally clear to me, but I somehow knew that these were not human voices. It took me quite some time to identify their source, and then a rather cheeky sparrow flittered down through those huge branches, hooked his tiny claws into the rough bark of the Tree a few feet from my face, and regarded me with his glittering little eyes.

‘Welcome, Polgara,’ he chirped. ‘What took you so long to find us?’

The mind of a child is frequently willing to accept the unusual or even the bizarre, but this went a little far. I stared at that talkative little bird in absolute astonishment.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he demanded.

‘You’re talking!’ I blurted.

‘Of course I am. We all talk. You just haven’t been listening. You should really pay closer attention to what’s going on around you. You aren’t going to hurt me, are you? I’ll fly away if you try, you know.’

‘N-no,’ I stammered. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

‘Good. Then we can talk. Did you happen to see any seeds on your way here?’

‘I don’t think so. I wasn’t really looking for seeds, though.’

‘You should learn to watch for them. My mate has three babies back at the nest, and I’m supposed to be out looking for seeds to feed them. What’s that on your sleeve?’

I looked at the sleeve of my smock. ‘It seems to be a seed of some kind – grass, probably.’

‘Well, don’t just stand there. Give it to me.’

I picked the seed off my sleeve and held it out to him. He hopped off the side of the Tree and perched on my finger, his head cocked and his bright little eye closely examining my offering. ‘It’s grass, all right,’ he agreed. Then he actually seemed to sigh. ‘I hate it when all there is to eat is immature grass-seed. It’s early in the season, and those seeds are so tiny right now.’ He took the seed in his beak. ‘Don’t go away. I’ll be right back.’ Then he flew off.

For a few moments I actually thought I’d been dreaming. Then my sparrow came back, and there was another one with him. This is my mate,’ he introduced her to me.

‘Hello, Polgara,’ she said. ‘Where did you find that seed? My babies are very hungry.’

‘It must have caught on my sleeve up near the top of that hill,’ I ventured.

‘Why don’t we go up there and have a look,’ she suggested, brazenly settling on my shoulder. The first sparrow followed his mate’s lead and perched on my other shoulder. All bemused by this miracle, I turned and started back up the grassy hill.

‘You don’t move very fast, do you?’ The first sparrow noted critically.

‘I don’t have wings,’ I replied.

‘That must be awfully tedious.’

‘It gets me to where I’m going.’

‘As soon as we find those seeds, I’ll introduce you to some of the others,’ he offered. ‘My mate and I’ll be busy feeding the babies for a while.’

‘Can you actually talk to other kinds of birds?’ That was a startling idea.

‘Well,’ he said deprecatingly, ‘sort of. The larks always try to be poetic, and the robins talk too much, and they’re always trying to shoulder their way in whenever I find food. I really don’t care that much for robins. They’re such bullies.’

And then a meadowlark swooped in and hovered over my head. ‘Whither goest thou?’ he demanded of my sparrow.

‘Up there,’ the sparrow replied, cocking his head toward the hilltop. ‘Polgara found some seeds up there, and my mate and I have babies to feed. Why don’t you talk with her while we tend to business?’

‘All right,’ the lark agreed. ‘My mate doth still sit upon our eggs, warming them with her substance, so I have ample time to guide our sister here.’

‘There’s a seed!’ the female sparrow chirped excitedly. And she swooped down off my shoulder to seize it. Her mate soon saw another, and the two of them flew off.

‘Sparrows are, methinks, somewhat overly excitable,’ the lark noted. ‘Whither wouldst thou go, sister?’

‘I’ll leave that up to you,’ I replied. ‘I’d sort of like to get to know more birds, though.’

And that began my education in ornithology. I met all manner of birds that morning. The helpful lark took me around and introduced me. His rather lyrical assessments of the varied species were surprisingly acute. As I’ve already mentioned, he told me that sparrows are excitable and talky. He characterized robins as oddly aggressive, and then added that they tended to say the same things over and over. Jays scream a lot. Swallows show off. Crows are thieves. Vultures stink. Hummingbirds aren’t really very intelligent. If he’s forced to think about it, the average hummingbird gets so confused that he forgets exactly how to hover in mid-air. Owls aren’t really as wise as they’re reputed to be, and my guide referred to them rather deprecatingly as ‘flying mouse-traps’. Seagulls have a grossly exaggerated notion of their own place in the overall scheme of things. Your average seagull spends a lot of his time pretending to be an eagle. I normally wouldn’t have seen any seagulls in the Vale, but the blustery wind had driven them inland. The assorted waterfowl spent almost as much time swimming as they did flying, and they were very clannish. I didn’t really care that much for ducks and geese. They’re pretty, I suppose, but their voices set my teeth on edge.

The aristocrats of birds are the raptors. The various hawks, depending on their size, have a complicated hierarchy, and standing at the very pinnacle of bird-dom is the eagle.

I communed with the various birds for the rest of the day, and by evening they had grown so accustomed to me that some of them, like my cheeky little sparrow and his mate, actually perched on me. As evening settled over the Vale I promised to return the next day, and my lyric lark accompanied me back to uncle Beldin’s tower.

‘What have you been doing, Pol?’ Beldaran asked curiously after I’d mounted the stairs and rejoined her. As was usual when we were talking to each other privately, Beldaran spoke to me in ‘twin’.

‘I met some birds,’ I replied.

‘ “Met”? How do you meet a bird?’

‘You talk to them, Beldaran.’

‘And do they talk back?’ Her look was amused.

‘Yes,’ I answered in an off-hand manner, ‘as a matter of fact, they do.’ If she wanted to be snippy and superior, I could play that game, too.

‘What do they talk about?’ Her curiosity subdued her irritation at my superior reply.

‘Oh, seeds and the like. Birds take a lot of interest in food. They talk about flying, too. They can’t really understand why I can’t fly. Then they talk about their nests. A bird doesn’t really live in his nest, you know. It’s just a place to lay eggs and raise babies.’

‘I’d never thought of that,’ my sister admitted.

‘Neither had I – until they told me about it. A bird doesn’t really need a home, I guess. They also have opinions.’

‘Opinions?’

‘One kind of bird doesn’t really have much use for other kinds of birds. Sparrows don’t like robins, and seagulls don’t like ducks.’

‘How curious,’ Beldaran commented.

‘What are you two babbling about now?’ uncle Beldin demanded, looking up from the scroll he’d been studying.

‘Birds,’ I told him.

He muttered something I won’t repeat here and went back to his study of that scroll.

‘Why don’t you take a bath and change clothes, Pol,’ Beldaran suggested a bit acidly. ‘You’ve got bird-droppings all over you.’

I shrugged. ‘They’ll brush off as soon as they dry.’

She rolled her eyes upward.

I left the tower early the next morning and went to the small storehouse where the twins kept their supplies. The twins are Alorns, and they do love their beer. One of the major ingredients in beer is wheat, and I was fairly sure they wouldn’t miss a small bag or two. I opened the bin where they kept the wheat and scooped a fair amount into a couple of canvas bags I’d found hanging on a hook on the back wall of the shed. Then, carrying the fruits of my pilferage, I started back for the Tree.

‘Whither goest thou, sister?’ It was my poetic lark again. It occurs to me that my affinity for the studied formality of Wacite Arendish speech may very well have been born in my conversations with that lark.

‘I’m going back to the Tree,’ I told him.

‘What are those?’ he demanded, stabbing his beak at the two bags I carried.

‘A gift for my new-found friends,’ I said.

‘What is a gift?’

‘You’ll see.’

Birds are sometimes as curious as cats, and my lark badgered me about what was in my bags all the way back to the Tree.

My birds were ecstatic when I opened the bags and spread the wheat around under the Tree, and they came in from miles around to feast. I watched them fondly for a time, and then I climbed up into the Tree and sprawled out on one huge limb to watch my new friends. I got the distinct impression that the Tree approved of what I had done.

I thought about that for quite a long time that morning, but I was still baffled about just exactly how I’d come by this unusual talent.

‘It’s the Tree’s gift to you, Polgara.’ It was mother’s voice, and suddenly everything became clear to me. Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that?

‘Probably because you weren’t paying attention,’ mother observed.

In the years that followed, the Tree became like a second home to me. I spent my days on my favorite perch with my skinny legs stretched out on the huge limb and my back against the massive trunk. I fed my birds and we talked. We came to know each other better and better, and they brought me information about the weather, forest fires, and occasional travelers passing through the Vale. My family was always carping about my shabby appearance, but my birds didn’t seem to mind.

As those of you who know me can attest, I have an occasionally sharp tongue. My family was spared all sorts of affronts because of my fondness for the Tree and its feathered inhabitants.

The seasons rolled by, and Beldaran and I grew into an awkward coltishness – all legs and elbows. And then one morning we discovered that we had become women during the night. There was some fairly visible evidence of the fact on our bed-clothing.

‘Are we dying?’ Beldaran asked me in a trembling voice.

‘Tell her to stop that, Polgara!’ mother’s voice came to me sharply. That was something I could never understand. Mother talked to me directly, but she never intruded into Beldaran’s mind. I’m sure there was a reason for it, but mother never got around to explaining.

‘What’s happening, mother?’ I demanded. To be honest about it, I was quite nearly as frightened as my sister was.

‘It’s a natural process, Polgara. It happens to all women.’

‘Make it stop!’

‘No. It has to happen. Tell Beldaran that it’s nothing to get excited about.’

‘Mother says that it’s all right,’ I told my sister.

‘How can it be all right?’

‘Shush. I’m trying to listen to mother.’

‘Don’t you shush me, Polgara!’

‘Then be still.’ I turned my attention inward. ‘You’d better explain this, mother,’ I said. ‘Beldaran’s about ready to fly apart.’ I didn’t really think it was necessary to admit that my seams were starting to come undone as well.

Then mother gave us a somewhat clinical explanation for the bloodstains on our bedding, and I passed the information on to my distraught sister.

‘Is it going to go on forever now?’ Beldaran asked me in a trembling voice.

‘No, only for a few days. Mother says to get used to it, because it’ll happen every month.’

‘Every month?’ Beldaran sounded outraged.

‘So she says.’ I raised up in bed and looked across the room toward Uncle Beldin’s bed – the place where all the snoring was coming from. ‘Let’s get this cleaned up while he’s still asleep,’ I suggested.

‘Oh, dear Gods, yes!’ she agreed fervently. ‘I’d die if he found out about this.’

I’m fairly sure that our misshapen uncle was aware of what was happening, but we never got around to discussing it, for some reason.

Uncle Beldin has theorized about when the members of my extended family develop what father calls ‘talent’, and he’s concluded that it emerges with the onset of puberty. I may have had something to do with that conclusion. I think I was about twelve or so. It was ‘that time of the month’ for Beldaran and me, and my sister was feeling mopey. I, on the other hand, was irritable. It was all so inconvenient! Mother had mentioned the fact that ‘something might happen’ now that Beldaran and I had reached a certain level of maturity, but she was a little vague about it. Evidently, it’s sort of necessary that our first venture into the exercise of our ‘talent’ be spontaneous. Don’t ask me why, because I haven’t got the faintest notion of a reasonable explanation for the custom.

As I remember the circumstances of that first incident, I was dragging a large bag of wheat down to the Tree to feed my birds. I was muttering to myself about that. Over the years my birds had come to depend on me, and they were not above taking advantage of my generosity. Given half a chance, birds, like all other creatures, can be lazy. I didn’t mind feeding them, but it seemed that I was spending more and more time hauling sacks of wheat from the twins’ tower to the Tree.

When I reached the Tree, they were all clamoring to be fed, and that irritated me all the more. As far as I know, not one single bird has ever learned how to say ‘thank you’.

There were whole flocks of them by now, and they cleaned up my daily offering in short order. Then they started screeching for more.

I was seated on my favorite perch, and the shrill importunings of the birds made me even more irritable. If there were only some way I could have an inexhaustible supply of seed on hand to keep them quiet.

The jays were being particularly offensive. There’s something about a jay’s squawking that cuts directly into me. Finally, driven beyond my endurance, I burst out. ‘More seeds!’ I half-shouted.

And suddenly, there they were – heaps and heaps of them! I was stunned. Even the birds seemed startled. I, on the other hand, felt absolutely exhausted.

Father has always used the phrase ‘the Will and the Word’ to describe what we do, but I think that’s a little limited. My experience seems to indicate that ‘the Wish and the Word’ works just as well.

Someday he and I’ll have to talk about that.

As is usually the case, my first experiment in this field made a lot of noise. I hadn’t even finished my self-congratulation when a blue-banded hawk and two doves came swooping in. Now, hawks and doves don’t normally flock together – except when the hawk is hungry – so I immediately had some suspicions. The three of them settled on my limb, and then they blurred, changing form before my very eyes.

‘Seeds, Polgara?’ Beltira said mildly. ‘Seeds?’

The birds were hungry,’ I said. What a silly excuse for a miracle that was!

‘Precocious, isn’t she?’ Belkira murmured to uncle Beldin.

‘We should probably have expected it,’ Beldin grunted. ‘Pol never does anything in the normal way.’

‘Will I be able to do that some day?’ I asked the twins.

‘Do what, Pol?’ Belkira asked gently.

‘What you just did – change myself into a bird and back?’

‘Probably, yes.’

‘Well now,’ I said as a whole new world of possibilities opened before my eyes. ‘Will Beldaran be able to do it too?’

Their expressions seemed to grow a bit evasive at that question. ‘No more of this, Pol,’ uncle Beldin said sternly, ‘not until we’ve explained a few things to you. This is very dangerous.’

‘Dangerous?’ That startled me.

‘You can do almost anything you put your mind to, Pol,’ Beltira explained, ‘but you can’t uncreate things. Don’t ever say, “Be not”. If you do, the force you’ve unleashed will recoil back on you, and you’ll be the one who’s destroyed.’

‘Why would I want to destroy anything?’

‘It’ll happen,’ Beldin assured me in that growling voice of his. ‘You’re almost as bad-tempered as I am, and sooner or later something will irritate you to the point that you’ll want to make it go away – to destroy it – and that’ll kill you.’

‘Kill?’

‘And more than kill. The purpose of the universe is to create things. She won’t let you come along behind her and undo her work.’

‘Wouldn’t that also apply to making things?’

‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

‘If unmaking things is forbidden, it seems logical that making them would be too.’

‘Making things is all right,’ Beldin assured me. ‘You just made about a half-ton of birdseed and you’re still here, but don’t ever try to erase what you’ve done. If it’s not right, that’s just too bad. Once it’s been made, you’re stuck with it.’

That hardly seems fair,’ I protested.

‘Did you really expect life to be fair to you, Pol?’ He replied.

‘But if I make it, it’s mine, isn’t it? I should be able to do anything I want with it, shouldn’t I?’

‘That’s not the way it works, Pol,’ Beltira told me. ‘Don’t experiment with it. We love you too much to lose you.’

‘What else is it that I’m not supposed to do?’

‘Don’t attempt the impossible,’ Belkira said. ‘Once you’ve committed your will to something, you have to go through with it. You can’t turn the will off once you’ve unleashed it. It’ll keep drawing more and more out of you to try to get the job done, and it’ll eventually take so much out of you that your heart will stop, and then you’ll die.’

‘How am I supposed to know what’s possible and what isn’t?’

‘Come to one of us before you start,’ Beltira said. ‘Talk it over with us and we’ll let you know if it’s all right.’

‘Nobody tells me what to do!’ I flared.

‘Do you want to die?’ Beldin demanded bluntly.

‘Of course not.’

‘Then do as you’re told,’ he growled. ‘No experimenting on your own. Don’t do anything this way without consulting with one of us first. Don’t try to pick up a mountain range or stop the sun. We’re trying to protect you, Pol. Don’t be difficult.’

‘Is there anything else?’ I was a little sullen at that point.

‘You’re very noisy,’ Belkira said bluntly.

‘What do you mean, “noisy”?’

‘When you do something this way, it makes a sound we can hear. When you made all that birdseed, it sounded like a thunderclap. Always remember that we’re not the only ones in the world with this particular gift. There’ll be times when you won’t want to announce the fact that you’re around. Here, I’ll show you.’

There was a large rock not far from the Tree, and uncle Belkira looked at it and frowned slightly. Then the rock seemed to vanish, and it instantly reappeared about a hundred yards away.

It wasn’t exactly a noise. I felt it more than I heard it, but it still seemed to rattle my teeth.

‘Now do you see what I mean?’ Belkira asked me.

‘Yes. That’s quite a sound, isn’t it?’

‘I’m glad you enjoyed it.’

They went on piling restrictions on me for quite some time. ‘Is that all?’ I asked finally. They were beginning to make me tired.

‘There’ll be more, Pol,’ Beltira said. “Those are just the things you need to know right now. Like it or not, your education’s just begun. You’ve got to learn to control this gift. Study very hard, Pol. Your life probably depends on it.’

‘Just smile and agree with them, Polgara,’ mother’s voice advised me. ‘I’ll take care of your education myself. Smile and nod and keep the peace when they try to instruct you, Pol. Don’t upset them by doing anything unusual while they’re around.’

‘Whatever you say, mother,’ I agreed.

And that’s how I really got my education. My uncles were frequently startled by just how fast I picked things up. They no sooner mentioned a particular feat than I did it – flawlessly. I’m sure they all thought they had a budding – but very dirty – genius on their hands. The truth of the matter was that mother had already taught me those rudimentary tricks. My mind and mother’s mind had been linked since before I was born, and so she was in a much better position to gauge the extent of my understanding. This made her a far better teacher than my uncles. It was about then that uncle Beldin left on some mysterious errand, and so my education fell on the twins’ shoulders – at least they thought it did. In actuality, mother taught me most of what I know.

I naturally told my sister about what had happened. Beldaran and I didn’t really have any secrets from each other.

Her face became rather wistful. ‘What was it like?’ she asked me.

‘I’ll show you how,’ I told her. Then you can find out for yourself.’

She sighed. ‘No, Pol,’ she replied. ‘Mother told me not to.’

‘Told? You mean she’s finally talking to you?’

‘Not when I’m awake,’ Beldaran explained. ‘Her voice comes to me when I’m dreaming.’

‘That’s a terribly cumbersome way to do it.’

‘I know, but there’s a reason for it. She told me that you’re supposed to do things. I’m just supposed to be.’

To be what?’

‘She hasn’t told me yet. She’ll probably get around to it one of these days.’

And that sent me away muttering to myself.

Mother told me about several of the things I might be capable of doing, and I tried them all. Translocation was a lot of fun, actually, and it taught me how to muffle the noise. I spent whole days bouncing rocks here and there about the Vale.

There were many tricks mother explained to me that I wasn’t able to practice, since they required the presence of other people, and aside from the twins and Beldaran, nobody else was around. Mother rather sternly told me not to experiment with Beldaran.

What my uncles chose to call my ‘education’ took me away from my Tree and my birds for extended periods of time, and I didn’t like that very much. I already knew about most of what they were telling me anyway, so it was all very tedious and monotonous for me.

‘Keep your temper, Polgara,’ mother told me on one occasion when I was right on the verge of an outburst.

‘But this is all so boring!’ I protested.

‘Think about something else, then.’

‘What should I think about?’

‘Have the twins teach you how to cook,’ she suggested. ‘Humans like to stick their food in a fire before they eat it. It’s always seemed like a waste of time to me, but that’s the way they are.’

And so it was that I started to get two educations instead of one. I learned all about translocation and about spices at almost the same time. One of the peculiarities of our gift is the fact that imagination plays a very large part in it, and I soon found that I could imagine what a given spice would add to whatever dish I was preparing. In this particular regard I soon even outstripped the twins. They measured things rather meticulously. I seasoned food by instinct – a pinch, a dollop, or a handful of any spice always seemed to work out just right.

‘That’s too much sage, Pol,’ Beltira protested when I dug my hand into one of his spice-pots.

‘Wait, uncle,’ I told him. ‘Don’t criticize my cooking until you’ve tasted it.’

And, as usual, the stew I was preparing came out perfect.

Beltira was a little sullen about that, as I recall.

And then there came a very important day in my life. It was the day – night actually – when mother revealed the secret of changing shape.

‘It’s really quite simple, Polgara,’ she told me. ‘All you really have to do is form the image of the alternative shape in your mind and then fit yourself into it.’

Mother’s idea of ‘simple’ and mine were miles apart, however.

‘The tail-feathers are too short,’ she said critically after my third attempt. ‘Try it again.’

It took me hours to get the imagined shape right. I was almost on the verge of giving up entirely. If I got the tail right, the beak was wrong – or the talons. Then the wing-feathers weren’t soft enough. Then the chest wasn’t strong enough. Then the eyes were too small. I was right at the edge of abandoning the whole notion when mother said, ‘That looks closer. Now just let yourself flow into it.’ Mother’s ability to see into my mind made her the best teacher I could possibly have had.

As I started to slip myself into the image I’d formed, I felt as if my body had turned into something almost liquid – like honey. I literally seeped into that imaginary shape.

And then it was done. I was a snowy owl. Once again, mother’s intimate contact with my mind simplified things enormously. There are far too many things involved in flying for anyone to pick it up immediately, so mother quite simply instilled all those minuscule shifts and dexterity in my mind. I thrust with my soft wings, and I was immediately airborne. I circled a few times, learning with every silent sweep of my wings, and those circles grew inexorably wider.

There’s an ecstasy to flying that I won’t even try to describe. By the time dawn began to stain the eastern horizon, I was a competent bird, and my mind was filled with a joy I’d never known before.

‘You’d better go back to the tower, Pol,’ mother advised. ‘Owls aren’t usually flying in the daytime.’

‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes. Let’s not give our little secret away just yet. You’ll have to change to your own form as well.’

‘Mother!’ I protested vehemently.

‘We can play again tomorrow night, Pol. Now go home and change back before anyone wakes up.’

That didn’t make me too happy, but I did as I was told.

It was not long after that that Beldaran took me to one side. ‘Uncle Beldin’s bringing father back to the Vale,’ she told me.

‘Oh? How do you know that?’

‘Mother told me – in a dream.’

‘A dream?’ That startled me.

‘She always talks to me in my dreams. I told you about that already.’

I decided not to make an issue of it, but I reminded myself to have a talk with mother about it. She always came to me when I was awake, but for some reason she spoke to my sister in the hazy world of dreams. I wondered why there was such a difference. I also wondered why mother had told Beldaran about our vagrant father’s homecoming and hadn’t bothered to let me know about it.

It was early summer when uncle Beldin finally brought father home. Over the course of the years since father had left the Vale, uncle Beldin had kept track of him and had reported on his various escapades, so I was not just too excited about his return. The idea of admitting that a beer-soaked lecher was my father didn’t appeal to me all that much.

He didn’t look too bad when he came up the stairs to the top of Beldin’s tower, but I knew that appearances could be deceiving.

‘Father!’ Beldaran exclaimed, rushing across the floor to embrace him. Forgiveness is a virtue, I suppose, but sometimes Beldaran carried it to extremes.

I did something that wasn’t very nice at that point. My only excuse was that I didn’t want father to get the mistaken impression that his homecoming was a cause for universal rejoicing. I didn’t quite hate him, but I definitely didn’t like him. ‘Well, Old Wolf,’ I said in as insulting a tone as I could manage, ‘I see you’ve finally decided to come back to the scene of the crime.’

Chapter 3

Then I proceeded to give my father a piece of my mind – several pieces, actually. I told him – at length – precisely what I thought of him, since I didn’t want him to mistakenly believe that Beldaran’s sugary display of sweetness and light was going to be universal. I also wanted to assert my independence, and I’m fairly sure I got that point across to him. It wasn’t really very attractive, but I was only thirteen at the time, so I still had a few rough edges.

All right, let’s get something out in the open right here and now. I’m no saint, and I never pretended to be. I’ve been occasionally referred to as ‘Holy Polgara’, and that’s an absolute absurdity. In all probability the only people who’ll really understand my feelings as a child are those who are twins themselves. Beldaran was the absolute center of my life, and she had been since before we were born. Beldaran was mine, and my jealousy and resentment knew no bounds when father ‘usurped’ her affection. Beldaran and her every thought belonged to me, and he stole her! My snide comment about the ‘scene of the crime’ started something that went on for eons. I’d spend hours polishing those snippy little comments, and I treasured each and every one of them.

Many of you may have noticed that the relationship between me and my father is somewhat adversarial. I snipe at him, and he winces. That started when I was thirteen years old, and it didn’t take long for it to turn into a habit that’s so deeply engrained in me that I do it automatically now.

One other thing as well. Those who knew Beldaran and me when we were children have always assumed that I was the dominant twin, the one who took the lead in all twinly matters. In actuality, however, Beldaran was dominant. I lived almost entirely for her approval, and in some ways I still do. There was a serene quality about Beldaran that I could never match. Perhaps it was because mother had instilled Beldaran’s purpose in her mind before we were ever born. Beldaran knew where she was going, but I hadn’t the foggiest notion of my destination. She had a certainty about her I could never match.

Father endured my ill-tempered diatribe with a calm grace that irritated me all the more. I finally even lapsed into some of the more colorful aspects of uncle Beldin’s vocabulary to stress my discontent – not so much because I enjoyed profanity, but more to see if I could get some kind of reaction out of father. I was just a little miffed by his calm indifference to my sharpest digs.

Then in the most off-hand way imaginable, father casually announced that my sister and I would be moving into his tower to live with him.

My language deteriorated noticeably at that point.

After father had left uncle Beldin’s tower, Beldaran and I spoke at some length in ‘twin’.

‘If that idiot thinks for one minute that we’re going to move in with him, he’s in for a very nasty surprise,’ I declared.

‘He is our father, Polgara,’ Beldaran pointed out.

‘That’s not my fault.’

‘We must obey him.’

‘Have you lost your mind?’

‘No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t.’ She looked around uncle Beldin’s tower. ‘I suppose we’d better start packing.’

‘I’m not going anyplace,’ I told her.

‘That’s up to you, of course.’

I was more than a little startled. ‘You’d go off and leave me alone?’ I asked incredulously.

‘You’ve been leaving me alone ever since you found the Tree, Pol,’ she reminded me. ‘Are you going to pack or not?’

It was one of the few times that Beldaran openly asserted her authority over me. She normally got what she wanted in more subtle ways.

She went to a cluttered area of uncle Beldin’s tower and began rummaging around through the empty wooden boxes uncle had stacked there.

‘I gather from the tone of things that you girls are having a little disagreement,’ uncle said to me mildly.

‘It’s more like a permanent rupture,’ I retorted. ‘Beldaran’s going to obey father, and I’m not’

‘I wouldn’t make any wagers, Pol.’ Uncle Beldin had raised us, after all, and he understood our little power structure.

‘This is right and proper, Pol,’ Beldaran said back over her shoulder. ‘Respect, if not love, compels our obedience.’

‘Respect? I haven’t got any respect for that beer-soaked mendicant!’

‘You should have, Pol. Suit yourself, though. I’m going to obey him. You can do as you like. You will visit me from time to time, won’t you?’

How could I possibly answer that? Now perhaps you can see the source of Beldaran’s power over me. She almost never lost her temper, and she always spoke in a sweetly reasonable tone of voice, but that was very deceptive. An ultimatum is an ultimatum, no matter how it’s delivered.

I stared at her helplessly.

‘Don’t you think you should start packing, dear sister?’ she asked sweetly.

I stormed out of uncle Beldin’s tower and went immediately to my Tree to sulk. A few short answers persuaded even my birds to leave me alone.

I spent that entire night in the Tree, hoping the unnatural separation would bring Beldaran to her senses. My sister, however, concealed a will of iron under that sweet, sunny exterior. She moved into father’s tower with him, and after a day or so of almost unbearable loneliness, I sulkily joined them.

This is not to say that I spent very much time in father’s cluttered tower. I slept there and occasionally ate with my father and sister, but it was summer. My Tree was all the home I really needed, and my birds provided me with company.

As I look back, I see a peculiar dichotomy of motives behind that summer sabbatical in the branches of the Tree. Firstly, of course, I was trying to punish Beldaran for her betrayal of me. Actually, though, I stayed in the Tree because I liked it there. I loved the birds, and mother was with me almost continually as I scampered around among the branches, frequently assuming forms other than my own. I found that squirrels are very agile. Of course I could always become a bird and simply fly up to the top-most branches, but there’s a certain satisfaction in actually climbing.

It was about midsummer when I discovered the dangers involved in taking the form of a rodent. Rodents of all sorts, from mice on up the scale, are looked upon as a food source by just about every other species in the world with the possible exception of goldfish. One bright summer morning I was leaping from limb to limb among the very top-most branches of the Tree when a passing hawk decided to have me for breakfast.

‘Don’t do that,’ I told him in a disgusted tone as he came swooping in on me.

He flared off, his eyes startled. ‘Polgara?’ he said in amazement. ‘Is that really you?’

‘Of course it is, you clot.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ he apologized. ‘I didn’t recognize you.’

‘You should pay closer attention. All manner of creatures get caught in baited snares when they think they’re about to get some free food.’

‘Who would try to trap me?’

‘You wouldn’t want to find out.’

‘Would you like to fly with me?’ he offered.

‘How do you know I can fly?’

‘Can’t everybody?’ he asked, sounding a bit startled. He was evidently a very young hawk.

To be absolutely honest, though, I enjoyed our flight. Each bird flies a little differently, but the effortless art of soaring, lifted by the unseen columns of warm air rising from the earth, gives one a sense of unbelievable freedom.

All right, I like to fly. So what?

Father had decided to leave me to my own devices that summer, probably because the sound of my voice grated on his nerves. Once, however, he did come to my Tree – probably at Beldaran’s insistence – to try to persuade me to come home. He, however, was the one who got a strong dose of persuasion. I unleashed my birds on him, and they drove him off.

I saw my father and my sister occasionally during the following weeks. In actuality, I stopped by from time to time to see if I could detect any signs of suffering in my sister. If Beldaran was suffering, though, she managed to hide it quite well. Father sat off in one corner during my visits. He seemed to be working on something quite small, but I really wasn’t curious about whatever it might have been.

It was early autumn when I finally discovered what he’d been so meticulously crafting. He came down to my Tree one morning, and Beldaran was with him. ‘I’ve got something for you, Pol,’ he told me.

‘I don’t want it,’ I told him from the safety of my perch.

‘Aren’t you being a little ridiculous, Pol?’ Beldaran suggested.

‘It’s a family trait,’ I replied.

Then father did something he’s very seldom done to me. One moment I was comfortably resting on my perch about twenty feet above the ground. At the next instant I was sprawled in the dirt at his feet. The old rascal had translocated me! That’s better,’ he said. ‘Now we can talk.’ He held out his hand, and there was a silver medallion on a silver chain hanging from his fingers. ‘This is for you,’ he told me.

Somewhat reluctantly I took it. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ I asked him.

‘You’re supposed to wear it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the Master says so. If you want to argue with Him, go right ahead. Just put it on, Pol, and stop all this foolishness. It’s time for us all to grow up.’

I looked rather closely at the amulet and saw that it bore the image of an owl. It occurred to me that this somehow very appropriate gift had come from Aldur instead of father. At that point in my life decorations of any kind seemed wildly inappropriate, but I immediately saw a use for this one. It bore the image of an owl, my favorite alternative form – and mother’s as well. Part of the difficulty of the shape-change is getting the image right, and father was evidently a very talented sculptor. The owl was so lifelike that it looked almost as if it could fly. This particular ornament would be very useful.

When I put it on, something rather strange came over me. I’d have sooner died than have admitted it, but I suddenly felt complete, as if something had always been missing.

‘And now we are three,’ Beldaran said vapidly.

‘Amazing,’ I said a bit acidly. ‘You do know how to count.’ My unexpected reaction to father’s gift had put me off-balance, and I felt the need to lash out at somebody – anybody.

‘Don’t be nasty,’ Beldaran told me. ‘I know you’re more clever than I am, Pol. You don’t have to hit me over the head with it. Now why don’t you stop all this foolishness and come back home where you belong?’

The guiding principle of my entire life at that point had been my rather conceited belief that nobody told me what to do. Beldaran disabused me of that notion right then and there. She could – and occasionally did – give me orders. The implied threat that she would withhold her love from me brought me to heel immediately.

The three of us walked on back to father’s tower. He seemed a little startled by my sudden change of heart, and I believe that even to this day he doesn’t fully understand the power Beldaran had over me.

Perhaps it was to cover his confusion that he offered me some left-over breakfast. I discovered immediately that this most powerful sorcerer in the world was woefully inadequate in the kitchen. ‘Did you do this to perfectly acceptable food on purpose, father?’ I asked him. ‘You must have. Nobody could have done something this bad by accident.’

‘If you don’t like it, Pol, there’s the kitchen.’

‘Why, I do believe you’re right, father,’ I replied in mock surprise. ‘How strange that I didn’t notice that. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you’ve got books and scrolls piled all over the working surfaces.’

He shrugged. “They give me something to read while I’m cooking.’

‘I knew that something must have distracted you. You couldn’t have ruined all this food if you’d been paying attention.’ Then I laid my arm on the counter-top and swept all his books and scrolls off on to the floor. ‘From now on, keep your toys out of my kitchen, father. Next time, I’ll burn them.’

‘Your kitchen?’

‘Somebody’s going to have to do the cooking, and you’re so inept that you can’t be trusted near a stove.’

He was too busy picking up his books to answer.

And that established my place in our peculiar little family. I love to cook anyway, so I didn’t mind, but in time I came to wonder if I hadn’t to some degree demeaned myself by taking on the chore of cooking. After a week or so, or three, things settled down, and our positions in the family were firmly established. I complained a bit now and then, but in reality I wasn’t really unhappy about it.

There was something else that I didn’t like, though. I soon found that I couldn’t undo the latch on the amulet father had made for me, but I was something of an expert on latches and I soon worked it out. The secret had to do with time, and it was so complex that I was fairly certain father hadn’t devised it all by himself. He had sculpted the amulet at Aldur’s instruction, after all, and only a God could have conceived of a latch that existed in two different times simultaneously.

Why don’t we just let it go at that? The whole concept still gives me a headache, so I don’t think I’ll go into it any further.

My duties in the kitchen didn’t really fill my days. I soon bullied Beldaran into washing the dishes after breakfast while I prepared lunch, which was usually something cold. A cold lunch never hurt anybody, after all, and once that was done, I was free to return to my Tree and my birds. Neither father nor my sister objected to my daily excursions, since it cut down on my opportunities to direct clever remarks at father.

And so the seasons turned, as they have a habit of doing.

We were pretty well settled in after the first year or so, and father had invited his brothers over for supper. I recall that evening rather vividly, since it opened my eyes to something I wasn’t fully prepared to accept. I’d always taken it as a given that my uncles had good sense, but they treated my disreputable father as if he were some sort of minor deity. I was in the midst of preparing a fairly lavish supper when I finally realized just how much they deferred to him.

I forget exactly what they were talking about – Ctuchik, maybe, or perhaps it was Zedar – but uncle Beldin rather casually asked my father, ‘What do you think, Belgarath? You’re first disciple, after all, so you know the Master’s mind better than we do.’

Father grunted sourly. ‘And if it turns out that I’m wrong, you’ll throw it in my teeth, won’t you?’

‘Naturally.’ Beldin grinned at him. ‘That’s one of the joys of being a subordinate, isn’t it?’

‘I hate you,’ Father said.

‘No you don’t, Belgarath,’ Beldin said, his grin growing even broader. ‘You’re just saying that to make me feel better.’

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard that particular exchange between those two. They always seem to think it’s hilarious for some reason.

The following morning I went on down to my Tree to ponder this peculiar behavior on the part of my uncles. Evidently father had done some fairly spectacular things in the dim past. My feelings about him were uncomplimentary, to say the very least. In my eyes he was lazy, more than a bit silly, and highly unreliable. I dimly began to realize that my father is a very complex being. On the one hand, he’s a liar, a thief, a lecher, and a drunkard. On the other, however, he’s Aldur’s first disciple, and he can quite possibly stop the sun in its orbit if he wants to. I’d been deliberately seeing only his foolish side because of my jealousy. Now I had to come to grips with the other side of him, and I deeply resented the shattering of my illusions about him.

I began to watch him more closely after I returned home that day, hoping that I could find some hints about his duality – and even more fervently hoping that I could not. Losing the basis for one’s prejudices is always very painful. All I really saw, though, was a rather seedy-looking old man intently studying a parchment scroll.

‘Don’t do that, Polgara,’ he said, not even bothering to look up from his scroll.

‘Do what?’

‘Stare at me like that.’

‘How did you know I was staring?’

‘I could feel it, Pol. Now stop.’

That shook my certainty about him more than I cared to admit. Evidently Beldin and the twins were right. There were a number of very unusual things about my father. I decided I’d better have a talk with mother about this.

‘He’s a wolf, Pol,’ mother told me, ‘and wolves play. You take life far too seriously, and his playing irritates you. He can be very serious when it’s necessary, but when it’s not, he plays. It’s the way of wolves.’

‘But he demeans himself so much with all that foolishness.’

‘Doesn’t your particular foolishness demean you? You’re far too somber, Pol. Learn how to smile and to have some fun once in a while.’

‘Life is serious, mother.’

‘I know, but it’s also supposed to be fun. Learn how to enjoy life from your father, Polgara. There’ll be plenty of time to weep, but you have to laugh as well.’

Mother’s tolerance troubled me a great deal, and I found her observations about my nature even more troubling.

I’ve had a great deal of experience with adolescents over the centuries, and I’ve discovered that as a group these awkward half-children take themselves far too seriously. Moreover, appearance is everything for the adolescent. I suppose it’s a form of play-acting. The adolescent knows that the child is lurking just under the surface, but he’d sooner die than let it out, and I was no different. I was so intent on being ‘grown-up’ that I simply couldn’t relax and enjoy life.

Most people go through this stage and outgrow it. Many, however, do not. The pose becomes more important than reality, and these poor creatures become hollow people, forever striving to fit themselves into an impossible mold.

Enough. I’m not going to turn this into a treatise on the ins and outs of human development. Until a person learns to laugh at himself, though, his life will be a tragedy – at least that’s the way he’ll see it.

The seasons continued their stately march, and the little lecture mother had delivered to me lessened my interior antagonism toward father. I did maintain my exterior facade, however. I certainly didn’t want the old fool to start thinking I’d gone soft on him.

And then, shortly after my sister and I turned sixteen, the Master paid my father a call and gave him some rather specific instructions. One of us – either Beldaran or myself – was to become the wife of Iron-grip and hence the Rivan Queen. Father, with rather uncharacteristic wisdom, chose to keep the visit to himself. Although I certainly had no particular interest in marrying at that stage of my life, my enthusiasm for competition might have led me into all sorts of foolishness.

My father quite candidly admits that he was sorely tempted to get rid of me by the simple expedient of marrying me off to poor Riva. The Purpose – Destiny, if you wish – which guides us all prevented that, however. Beldaran had been preparing for her marriage to Iron-grip since before she was born. Quite obviously, I hadn’t been.

I resented my rejection, though. Isn’t that idiotic? I’d been involved in a competition for a prize I didn’t want, but when I lost the competition, I felt the sting of losing quite profoundly. I didn’t even speak to my father for several weeks, and I was even terribly snippy with my sister.

Then Anrak came down into the Vale to fetch us. With the exception of an occasional Ulgo and a few messengers from King Algar, Anrak was perhaps the first outsider I’d ever met and certainly the first whoever showed any interest in me. I rather liked him, actually. Of course he did propose marriage to me, and a girl always has a soft spot in her heart for the young man who asks her for the first time. Anrak was an Alorn, with all that implies. He was big, burly, and bearded, and there was good-humored simplicity about him that I rather liked. I didn’t like the way he always reeked of beer, however.

I was busy sulking in my Tree when he arrived, so we didn’t even have time to get acquainted before he proposed. He came swaggering down the Vale one beautiful morning in early spring. My birds alerted me to his approach, so he didn’t really surprise me when he came in under the branches of my Tree.

‘Hello, up there,’ he called to me.

I looked down from my perch at him. ‘What do you want?’ It wasn’t really a very gracious greeting.

‘I’m Anrak – Riva’s cousin – and I came here to escort your sister to the Isle so Riva can marry her.’

That immediately put him in the camp of the enemy. ‘Go away,’ I told him bluntly.

There’s something I need to ask you first.’

‘What?’

‘Well, like I said, I’m Riva’s cousin, and he and I usually do things together. We got drunk together for the first time, and visited a brothel together for the first time, and even both killed our first man in the same battle, so as you can see, we’re fairly close.’

‘So?’

‘Well, Riva’s going to marry your sister, and I thought it might be sort of nice if I got married, too. What do you say?’

‘Are you proposing marriage to me?’

‘I thought I said that. This is the first time I’ve ever proposed to anybody, so I probably didn’t do a very good job. What do you think?’

‘I think you’re insane. We don’t even know each other.’

‘There’ll be plenty of time for us to get to know each other after the ceremony. Well, yes or no?’

You couldn’t fault Anrak’s directness. Here was a man who got right down to the point. I laughed at him, and he looked just a bit injured by that. ‘What’s so funny?’ he demanded in a hurt tone of voice.

‘You are. Do you actually think I’d marry a complete stranger? One who looks like a rat hiding in a clump of bushes?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You’ve got hair growing all over your face.’

‘That’s my beard. All Alorns wear beards.’

‘Could that possibly be because Alorns haven’t invented the razor yet? Tell me, Anrak, have your people come up with the idea of the wheel yet? Have you discovered fire, by any chance?’

‘You don’t have to be insulting. Just say yes or no.’

‘All right. No! Was there any part of that you didn’t understand?’ Then I warmed to my subject. The whole notion is absurd,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know you, and I don’t like you. I don’t know your cousin, and I don’t like him either. As a matter of fact, I don’t like your entire stinking race. All the misery in my life’s been caused by Alorns. Did you really think I’d actually marry one? You’d better get away from me, Anrak, because if you don’t, I’ll turn you into a toad.’

‘You don’t have to get nasty. You’re no prize yourself, you know.’

I won’t repeat what I said to him then – this document might just fall into the hands of children. I spoke at some length about his parents, his extended family, his race, his ancestors and probable descendants. I drew rather heavily on uncle Beldin’s vocabulary in the process, and Anrak frequently looked startled at the extent of my command of the more colorful side of language.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if that’s the way you feel about it, there’s not much point in our continuing this conversation, is there?’ And then he rather huffily turned and strode back up the Vale, muttering to himself.

Poor Anrak. I was feeling a towering resentment over the fact that some unknown Alorn was going to take my sister away from me, and so he had the privilege of receiving the full weight of my displeasure. Moreover, mother’d strongly advised me to steer clear of any lasting entanglements at this stage of my life. Adolescent girls have glandular problems that sometimes lead them to make serious mistakes.

Why don’t we just let it go at that?

I had absolutely no intention of going to the Isle of the Winds to witness this obscene ceremony. If Beldaran wanted to marry this Alorn butcher, she was going to have to do it without my blessing – or my presence.

When they were ready to leave, however, my sister came down to my Tree and ‘persuaded’ me to change my mind. Despite that sweet exterior that deceived everyone else, my sister Beldaran could be absolutely ruthless when she wanted something. She knew me better than anyone else in the world did – or could – so she knew exactly where all my soft spots were. To begin with, she spoke to me exclusively in ‘twin’, a language I’d almost forgotten. There were subtleties in ‘twin’ – mostly of Beldaran’s devising – that no linguist, even the most gifted, could ever unravel, and most of them stressed her dominant position. Beldaran was accustomed to giving me orders, and I was accustomed to obeying. Her ‘persuasion’ in this situation was, to put it honestly, brutal. She reminded me of every time in our lives when we’d been particularly close, and she cast those reminders in a past tense peculiar to our private tongue that would more or less translate into ‘never again’, or ‘over and done with’. She had me in tears within five minutes and in utter anguish within ten. ‘Stop!’ I cried out finally, unable to bear the implicit threat of a permanent severing of all contact any longer.

‘You’ll come with me then?’ she asked, reverting to ordinary speech.

‘Yes! Yes! Yes! But please stop!’

‘I’m so happy about your decision, Pol,’ she said, embracing me warmly. Then she actually apologized for what she’d just done to me. Why not? She’d just won, so she could afford to be graceful about the whole thing.

I was beaten, and I knew it. I wasn’t even particularly surprised to discover when Beldaran and I returned to father’s tower that she’d already packed for me. She’d known all along just how things would turn out.

We set out the next morning. It took us several weeks to reach Muros, since we traveled on foot.

Beldaran and I were both uneasy in Muros, since we’d never really been around that many people before. Although I’ve changed my position a great deal since then, at first I found Sendars to be a noisy people, and they seemed to me to have a positive obsession with buying and selling that was almost laughable.

Anrak left us at Muros to go on ahead to advise Riva that we were coming. We hired a carriage, and the four of us, father, uncle Beldin, Beldaran and I rode the rest of the way to Camaar. Frankly, I’d have rather walked. The stubby ponies drawing the carriage didn’t really move very fast, and the wheels of the carriage seemed to find every single rock and rut in the road. Riding in carriages didn’t really become pleasant until some clever fellow came up with a way to install springs in them.

Camaar was even more crowded with people than Muros had been. We took some rooms in a Sendarian inn and settled down to wait for Riva’s arrival. I found it rather disconcerting to see buildings every time I looked out the window. Sendars appeared to have a kind of revulsion to open spaces. They always seem to want to ‘civilize’ everything.

The innkeeper’s wife, a plump, motherly little woman, seemed bent on ‘civilizing’ me as well. She kept offering me the use of the bath-house, for one thing. She rather delicately suggested that I didn’t smell very sweet.

I shrugged off her suggestions. ‘It’s a waste of time,’ I told her. ‘I’ll only get dirty again. The next time it rains, I’ll go outside. That should take the smell and the worst of the dirt off me.’

She also offered me a comb and a brush – which I also refused. I wasn’t going to let the Alorn who’d stolen my sister away from me get some idea that I was taking any pains to make myself presentable for his sake.

The nosey innkeeper’s wife then went so far as to suggest a visit to a dressmaker. I wasn’t particularly impressed by the fact that we’d shortly be entertaining a king, but she was.

‘What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?’ I asked her pugnaciously.

‘Different occasions require different clothing, dear,’ she replied.

‘Foolishness,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a new smock when this one wears out.’

I think she gave up at that point. I’m sure she thought I was incorrigibly ‘woodsy’, one of those unfortunates who’ve never received the benefits of civilization.

And then Anrak brought Riva to our rooms. I’ll grant that he was physically impressive. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone – except the other men in his family – quite so tall. He had blue eyes and a black beard, and I hated him. He muttered a brief greeting to my father, and then he sat down to look at Beldaran.

Beldaran looked right back.

It was probably the most painful afternoon I’d spent in my entire life up until then. I’d hoped that Riva would be more like his cousin, Anrak, blurting out things that would offend my sister, but the idiot wouldn’t say anything! All he could do was look at her with that adoring expression on his face, and Beldaran was almost as bad in her obvious adoration of him.

I was definitely fighting a rear-guard action here.

We all sat in absolute silence watching them adore each other, and every moment was like a knife in my heart. I’d lost my sister, there wasn’t much question about that. I wasn’t going to give either of them the satisfaction of seeing me bleed openly, however, so I did all of my bleeding inside. It was quite obvious that the separation of Beldaran and me which had begun before we were ever born was now complete, and I wanted to die.

Finally, when it was almost evening, my last hope died, and I felt tears burning my eyes.

Rather oddly – I hadn’t been exactly polite to him – it was father who rescued me. He came over and took my hand. ‘Why don’t we take a little walk, Pol?’ he suggested gently. Despite my suffering, his compassion startled me. He was the last one in the world I’d have expected that from. My father does surprise me now and then.

He led me from the room, and I noticed as we left that Beldaran didn’t even take her eyes off Riva’s face as I went away. That was the final blow, I think.

Father took me down the hallway to the little balcony at the far end, and we went outside, closing the door behind us.

I tried my very best to keep my sense of loss under control. ‘Well,’ I said in my most matter-of-fact way, ‘I guess that settles that, doesn’t it?’

Father murmured some platitudes about destiny, but I wasn’t really listening to him. Destiny be hanged! I’d just lost my sister! Finally, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. With a wail I threw my arms around his neck and buried my face in his chest, weeping uncontrollably.

That went on for quite some time until I’d finally wept myself out. Then I got my composure back. I decided that I wouldn’t ever let Riva or Beldaran see me suffering, and, moreover, that I’d take some positive steps to show them that I really didn’t care that my sister was willingly deserting me. I questioned father about some things that wouldn’t have concerned me before – baths, dressmakers, combs, and the like. I’d show my sister how little I really cared. If I was suffering, I’d make sure that she suffered too.

I took particular pains with my bath. In my eyes this was a sort of funeral – mine – and it was only proper that I should look my best when they laid me out. My chewed off fingernails gave me a bit of concern at first, but then I remembered our gift. I concentrated on my nails and then said, ‘Grow.’

And that took care of that.

Then I luxuriated for almost an hour in my bath. I wanted to soak off all the accumulated dirt, certainly, but I was surprised to discover that bathing felt good.

When I climbed out of the barrel-like wooden tub, I toweled myself down, put on a robe, and sat down to deal with my hair. It wasn’t easy. My hair hadn’t been washed since the last rain-storm in the Vale, and it was so tangled and snarled that I almost gave up on it. It took a lot of effort, and it was very painful, but at last I managed to get it to the point where I could pull a comb through it.

I didn’t sleep very much that night, and I arose early to continue my preparations. I sat down in front of a mirror made of polished brass and looked at my reflection rather critically. I was somewhat astonished to discover that I wasn’t nearly as ugly as I’d always imagined. As a matter of fact, I was quite pretty.

‘Don’t let it go your head, Pol,’ mother’s voice told me. ‘You didn’t actually think that I’d give birth to an ugly daughter, did you?’

‘I’ve always thought I was hideous, mother,’ I said.

‘You were wrong. Don’t overdo it with your hair. The white lock doesn’t need any help to make you pretty.’

The blue dress father’d obtained for me was really quite nice. I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. I was just a little embarrassed by what I saw. There wasn’t any question that I was a woman. I’d been more or less ignoring certain evidences of my femaleness, but that was no longer really possible. The dress positively screamed the fact. There was a problem with the shoes, though. They had pointed toes and medium heels, and they hurt my feet. I wasn’t used to shoes, but I gritted my teeth and endured them.

The more I looked in my mirror, the more I liked what I saw. The worm I’d always been had just turned into a butterfly. I still hated Riva, but my hatred softened just a bit. He hadn’t intended it, but it was his arrival in Camaar that had revealed to me what I really was.

I was pretty! I was something even beyond pretty!

‘What an amazing thing,’ I murmured.

My victory was made complete that morning when I demurely – I’d practiced for a couple of hours – entered the room where the others were sitting. I’d more or less taken the reactions of Riva and Anrak for granted. Uneducated though I was, I knew how they’d view me in my altered condition. The face I looked at was Beldaran’s.

I’d rather hoped to see just a twinge of envy there, but I should have known better. Her expression was just a little quizzical, and when she spoke, it was in ‘twin’. What passed between us was intensely private. ‘Well, finally,’ was all she said, and then she embraced me warmly.

Chapter 4

I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed that my sister didn’t turn green with envy, but no triumph is ever total, is it?

Anrak’s face grew melancholy, and he sighed. He explained to Riva how much he regretted not having pressed his suit.

Isn’t that an absurd turn of phrase? It makes Anrak sound like a laundress with a hot flat-iron.

Sorry.

His rueful admission made my morning complete, and it opened whole new vistas to me. Being adored is a rather pleasant way to pass the time, wouldn’t you say? Not only that, both Anrak and his cousin automatically ennobled me by calling me ‘Lady Polgara’, and that has a rather nice ring to it.

Then Riva’s cousin came up with a number of profound misconceptions about what father calls our ‘talent’. He clearly believed that my transformation had been the result of magic and even went so far as to suggest that I could be in two places – and times – simultaneously. I rather gently tweaked his beard on that score. I found myself growing fonder and fonder of Anrak. He said such nice things about me.

It was perhaps noon by the time we went down to the harbor to board Riva’s ship. Beldaran and I had never seen the sea before, nor a ship, for that matter, and we both were a little apprehensive about our upcoming voyage. The weather was fine, though there were all those waves out there. I’m not sure exactly what we’d expected, but all the ponds in the Vale had absolutely flat surfaces, so we weren’t prepared for waves. There was also a peculiar odor about the sea. It had a sharp tang to it that overlaid the more disgusting smells that characterize every harbor in the world. I suppose it’s human nature to dispose of garbage in the simplest way possible, but it struck me as improvident to dump it into a body of water that’ll return it to you on each incoming tide.

The ship seemed quite large to me, but I found the cabins below decks tiny and cramped, and everything seemed to be coated with a black, greasy substance. ‘What’s that smeared all over the walls?’ I asked uncle Beldin.

‘Tar,’ he replied with an indifferent shrug. ‘It helps to keep the water out.’

That sort of alarmed me. ‘The boat’s made of wood,’ I said. ‘Isn’t wood supposed to float?’

‘Only when it’s one solid piece, Pol. The sea wants to have a level surface, and empty places under that surface offend it, so it tries to seep in and fill up those spaces. And the tar keeps the wood from rotting.’

‘I don’t like it.’

‘I’m sure your opinion hurts its feelings.’

‘You always have to try to be clever, don’t you, uncle?’

‘Look upon it as a character defect if you like.’ He grinned.

After Beldaran and I had deposited our belongings in our tiny cabin, we went back up on deck. Riva’s sailors were making the vessel ready to depart. They were burly, bearded men, many of whom were stripped to the waist. All that bare skin made me just a little jumpy for some reason.

There seemed to be ropes everywhere – an impossible snarl passing through pulleys and running upward in an incomprehensible tangle. The sailors untied the ropes that held the ship up against the wharf, and then pushed us a ways out and took their places at the oars. One ruffian with an evil face sat cross-legged in the stern and began to pound rhythmically on a hide-topped drum to set the pace for the oarsmen. The ship moved slowly out through the crowded harbor toward the open sea.

Once we were past the breakwater, the sailors pulled in their oars and began hauling on various ropes. I still don’t fully understand exactly how a sailor can tell one rope from another, but Riva’s men seemed to know what they were doing. Large horizontal beams with tightly rolled canvas attached to them crept up the masts as the chanting sailors pulled on the ropes in a unison set by the rhythm of the chant. The pulleys squealed as the canvas-bearing beams rose to the tops of the masts. Then aloft, other sailors, agile as monkeys, untied the canvas and let it roll down. The sails hung slack for a few moments. Then a breeze caught them and they bellied out with a booming sound.

The ship rolled slightly to one side, and then it began to move. Water foamed as the bow of the ship cut into the waves, and the breeze of our passage touched my face and tossed my hair. The waves were not high enough to be alarming, and Riva’s ship mounted each one with stately pace and then majestically ran down the far side.

I absolutely loved it!

The ship and the sea became unified, and there was a music to that unification, a music of groaning timbers, creaking ropes, and booming sails. We moved out across the sun-touched waves with the music of the sea filling our ears.

I’ve frequently made light, disparaging remarks about Alorns and their fascination with the sea, but there’s a kind of holiness in it – almost as if true sailors have a different God. They don’t just love the sea; they worship it, and in my heart I know why.

‘I can’t see the land any more!’ Beldaran exclaimed that evening, looking apprehensively sternward.

‘You aren’t supposed to, love,’ Riva told her gently. ‘We’d never get home if we tried to keep the Sendarian coast in plain sight the whole way to the Isle.’

The sunset on the sea ahead of us was glorious, and when the moon rose, she built a broad, gleaming highway across the glowing surface of the night-dark sea.

All bemused by the beauty around me, I sat down on a convenient barrel, crossed my arms on the rail, and set my chin on them to drink in the sense of the sea. I remained in that reverie all through the night, and the sea claimed me as her own. My childhood had been troubled, filled with resentments and a painful, almost mortifying sense of my own inadequacy. The sea calmed those troubled feelings with her serene immensity. Did it really matter that one little girl with skinned knees felt all pouty because the world didn’t genuflect every time she walked by? The sea didn’t seem to think so, and increasingly as the hours passed, neither did I.

The dawn announced her coming with a pale light just above the sternward horizon. The world seemed filled with a grey, shadowless luminescence, and the dark water became as molten silver. When the sun, made ruddy by the sea mist, mounted above the eastern horizon, he filled my heart with a wonder such as I’d never known before.

But the sea wasn’t done with me yet. Her face was like molten glass, and then something immense swelled up from beneath without actually breaking the surface. The resulting surge was untouched by foam or silly little splashings. It was far too profound for that kind of childish display. I felt a sudden sense of superstitious terror. The mythology of the world positively teems with sea-monsters, and Beltira and Belkira had amused Beldaran and me when we were very young by telling us stories, usually of Alorn origin. No sea-going people will ever pass up the chance to talk about sea-monsters, after all.

‘What’s that?’ I asked a sleepy-eyed sailor who’d just come up on deck, and I pointed at the disturbance in the water.

He squinted over the rail. ‘Oh,’ he said in an off-hand way, ‘those be whales, my Lady.’

‘Whales?’

‘Big fish, my Lady.’ He squinted at the sea again. ‘It’s the time of year when they flock together. I’d guess that there be quite a few down there.’

‘Is that why the water’s bulging up like that – because there are so many?’

‘No, my Lady. One whale all by himself can make the sea heave that way.’

I was sure he was exaggerating, but then an enormous dark form erupted from the water like a mountain aborning. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! Nothing alive could be that big!

Then he crashed with a boom back into the sea, sending great sheets of water in all directions, and he slapped his tail down against the surface with another huge noise and disappeared.

Then he jumped again, and again.

He was playing!

And then he was not alone. Other whales also came surging up out of the sea to leap and play in the morning sun like a crowd of overgrown children frolicking in a play yard.

And they laughed! Their voices were high-pitched, but they were not squeaky. There was a profound depth to them and a kind of yearning.

One of them – I think it was that first one – rolled over on his side to look at me with one huge eye. There were wrinkles around that eye as if he were very, very old, and there was a profound wisdom there.

And then he winked at me and plunged back into the depths.

No matter how long I live, I’ll always remember that strange meeting. In some obscure way it’s shaped my entire view of the world and of everything that’s hidden beneath the surface of ordinary reality. That single event made the tedious journey from the Vale and this voyage worthwhile – and more.

We were another two days reaching Riva, and I spent those days filled with the wonder of the sea and of those creatures she supported as a mother supports her children.

The Isle of the Winds is a bleak, inhospitable place that rises out of a usually storm-tossed sea, and when viewed from the water the city seems as unwelcoming as the rock upon which it’s built. It rises steeply from the harbor in a series of narrow terraces, and each row of houses stands at the brink of the terrace upon which it’s built. The seaward walls of those houses are thick and windowless, and battlements surmount them. In effect this makes the city little more than a series of impenetrable walls rising one after another to the Citadel which broods down over the entire community. Whole races could hurl themselves at Riva with no more effect than the waves have upon the cliffs of the Isle itself. As the Master said, ‘All the tides of Angarak cannot prevail against it,’ and when you add the Cherek fleet patrolling the waters just off the coast, you have the potential for the extinction of any race foolish enough even to contemplate the notion of making war on the Rivans. Torak’s crazy, but he’s not that crazy.

Beldaran and I had taken some rather special pains to make ourselves presentable that morning. Beldaran was to be Queen of Riva, and she wanted to make a good impression on her future subjects. I was not going to be the queen, and my target was a certain specific segment of the population. I was rather carefully taking aim at all the young men, and I think I hit most of them. What a glorious thing it is to be universally adored! My father’s slightly worried expression made my morning complete.

‘Don’t let it go to your head, Polgara,’ mother’s voice cautioned me. ‘What you’re seeing on all those vacant faces isn’t love. Young males of all species have urges that they can’t really control. In their eyes you’re not a person; you’re an object. You don’t really want to be no more than a thing, do you?’

The prospect of incipient thinghood put a slight damper on my enjoyment of the moment.

Traditionally, Rivans wear grey clothing. As a matter of fact, the other western races call them ‘grey-cloaks’. Young people, however, tend to ignore the customs of their elders. Adolescent rebellion has been responsible for all manner of absurd costumes. The more ridiculous a certain fashion is, the more adolescents will cling to it. The young men crowding the edge of the wharf with yearning eyes put me in mind of a flower garden planted by someone with absolutely no sense of taste. There were doublets down there in hues I didn’t even have names for, and some of those short jackets were varicolored, and the colors clashed hideously. Each of my worshipers, however, was absolutely convinced that his clothing was so splendid that no girl in her right mind could possibly resist him.

I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to burst out laughing. My father’s concern about what he felt to be my fragile chastity was totally inappropriate. I wasn’t going to surrender to some adolescent whose very appearance sent me off into gales of laughter.

After the sailors had snubbed up the mooring ropes, we disembarked and started up the stairs that lead from the harbor to Riva’s Citadel. That series of stair-stepping walls that are part of the city’s defenses were revealed as a part of the houses in which the Rivans lived. The houses seemed bleak on the outside, but I’ve since discovered that the interiors of those houses are places of beauty. In many ways they are like the Rivans themselves. All the beauty is on the inside. The streets of Riva are narrow and monotonously straight. I strongly suspect that Riva had been guided by Belar in the construction of the city. Everything about it has a defensive purpose.

There was a shallow courtyard surrounded by a massive wall at the top of the stairs. The size of the roughly squared-off stones in that wall startled me. The amount of sheer physical labor which had gone into the construction of the city was staggering. We entered the Citadel through a great iron-bound door, and I found the interior of my sister’s new home depressingly bleak. It took us quite some time to reach our quarters. Beldaran and I were temporarily ensconced in a quite pleasant set of rooms. I say temporarily because Beldaran would soon be moving into the royal apartment.

‘You’re having fun, aren’t you, Pol?’ My sister asked me once we were alone. Her voice seemed just a bit wistful, and she spoke in ‘twin’.

‘I don’t exactly follow you,’ I replied.

‘Now that you’ve decided to be pretty, you’ve got every young man you come across fawning all over you.’

‘You’ve always been pretty, Beldaran,’ I reminded her.

She sighed a rather sweet little sigh. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but I never got the chance to play with it. What’s it like to have everybody around you dumbstruck with adoration?’

‘I rather like it.’ I laughed. They’re all very foolish, though. If you’re hungry for adoration, get yourself a puppy.’

She also laughed. ‘I wonder if all young men are as silly as these Rivans are. I’d sort of hate to be the queen of the idiots.’

‘Mother says that it’s more or less universal,’ I told her, ‘and it’s not just humans. Wolves are the same way, and so are rabbits. She says that all young males have what she calls “urges”. The Gods arranged it that way, I guess – so that there’ll always be a lot of puppies.’

‘That’s a depressing turn of phrase, Pol. It sort of implies that all I’m here for is to produce babies.’

‘Mother says that passes after a while. I guess it’s supposed to be fun, so enjoy it while you can.’

She blushed.

‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go break a few hearts.’

There was a large hall near the center of the Citadel that seemed to be where the members of Riva’s court gathered for fun and games. The throne room was reserved for more formal occasions, and unlike the rowdy throne room in Val Alorn where the Chereks mixed business and pleasure, Riva’s Citadel had separate places for separate activities. The door to the hall was open, and I peeked around the edge of that door to assess my competition.

Rivan girls, like all Alorns, tend to be blonde, and I saw an immediate advantage there. My dark hair would make me stand out in the middle of what appeared to be a wheat field. The young people in that large room were doing young-people things, flirting, showing off, and the like. I waited, biding my time until one of those lulls in the general babble hushed the room. Somehow I instinctively knew that the hush would eventually come. That was when I’d make my appearance. Entrances are very important in these circumstances.

I finally got a little tired of waiting. ‘Make them be still, mother,’ I pleaded with the presence that had been in my mind since before I was born.

‘Oh, dear,’ mother sighed.

Then a hush fell over the brightly dressed throng.

I’d considered the notion of some kind of fanfare, but that might have been just a trifle ostentatious. Instead, I simply stepped into the precise center of the doorway and stopped, waiting for them all to notice me. My blue gown was rather nice, so I was sure I’d attract attention.

I think mother – or possibly Aldur – had fallen in with my scheme. There was a fairly large window high in the wall opposite the door and after I’d stood in the doorway for a moment, the sun broke through the clouds which almost perpetually veiled the Isle, and its light came through the window to fall full upon me.

That was even better than a fanfare. I stood regally in the middle of that sun-flooded doorway, letting all the eyes in the room feast themselves on me.

Dear Gods, that was enjoyable!

All right, it was vain and a little silly. So what? I was young.

There was a small group of musicians at the far end of the room – I’d hardly call them an orchestra – and they struck up a tune as I regally entered the hall. As I’d rather hoped they would, most of the young men began to move in my general direction, each of them mentally refining some opening remark that he hoped would get my attention. You have no idea how strained and inane some of those remarks were. After about the fourth time someone compared my eyes to a spring sky, I began to realize that unrestrained creativity was not exactly rampant among adolescents. It somehow seemed that I was adrift in a sea of platitudes. I got compared to summer days, starry nights, and dark, snow-capped peaks – a rather obvious reference to the white streak in my hair. They swarmed around me like a flock of sparrows, elbowing each other out of the way. The Rivan girls began to look a little sulky about the whole business.

A young blond fellow in a green doublet – quite handsome, actually – pushed his way to the forefront of my suitors and bowed rather floridly. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Lady Polgara, I presume?’ That was a novel approach. He gave me a rather sly smile. ‘Tedious, isn’t it? All this empty conversation, I mean. How much time can one really spend talking about the weather?’

That earned him a few dark looks as a number of my suitors hastily revised their opening remarks.

‘I’m certain you and I can find something more pleasant to talk about,’ he continued smoothly, ‘politics, theology, or current fashion, if you’d like.’ He actually seemed to have a mind.

‘We might want to think about that a bit,’ I countered. ‘What’s your name?’

He slapped his forehead in feigned chagrin. ‘How stupid of me,’ he said. ‘How could I possibly have been so absentminded?’ He sighed theatrically. ‘It’s a failing of mine, I’m afraid. Sometimes I think I need a keeper.’ He gave me a sly look. ‘Would you care to volunteer for the post?’ he offered.

‘You still haven’t told me your name,’ I reminded him, ignoring his offer.

‘You really shouldn’t let me get sidetracked that way, Lady Polgara,’ he chided gently. ‘Before I forget again, I’m Kamion, an incipient baron – just as soon as my childless uncle dies. Where were we?’

I’ll confess that I liked him. His approach had some genuine originality, and his little-boy manner was appealing. I realized at that point that this whole business might just be a bit more challenging than I’d expected. Not all of my suitors were freshly weaned puppies. Some of them even had brains. That was rather refreshing. After all, if you’ve seen one furiously wagging tail, you’ve seen them all. I actually experienced a slight twinge of disappointment when the swarming suitors swept Kamion away.

The platitudes came thick and fast after that, but nobody chose to talk about the weather for some reason.

The Rivan girls grew sulkier and sulkier, and just to tweak them a little more I dispensed a number of dazzlingly regal smiles. My suitors found those smiles absolutely enchanting; the girls didn’t.

The afternoon progressed in a very satisfactory way, and then the musicians – lutanists for the most part – struck up a new tune, and a thin, weedy young man dressed all in black and wearing a studiously melancholy expression pushed his way forward. ‘Would you care to dance, Lady Polgara?’ he asked me in a broken-hearted tone. He bowed. ‘Permit me to introduce myself. I’m Merot the poet, and I might be able to compose a sonnet for you while we dance.’

‘I’m very sorry, my lord Merot,’ I replied, ‘but I’ve lived in isolation, so I don’t really know how to dance.’ It wasn’t true, of course. Beldaran and I had been inventing dances since we were children, but I was fairly certain that the rhythm of a meadowlark’s song might be just a little difficult for this self-proclaimed poet to comprehend.

Merot was obviously a poseur, but so were most of the others. He seemed to think that his carefully manicured short black beard and tragic expression made him irresistible to all the girls. I didn’t have too much trouble resisting him, though. Maybe it was his rancid breath that made me keep my distance.

‘Ah,’ he responded to my confession of terpsichorean ineptitude, ‘what a pity.’ Then his gloomy eyes brightened. ‘I could give you private lessons, if you’d like.’

‘We might discuss that sometime,’ I parried, still staying back from that foul breath.

‘Might I offer you a poem then?’ he suggested.

That would be nice.’

What a mistake that was! Merot assumed an oratorical stance and began to recite in a tediously slow manner with that gloomy voice of his. He spoke as if the fate of the universe hung on his every word. I didn’t notice the sun darken, though, or feel any earthquakes.

He went on and on and on, and his pose as a poet was much, much better than his actual verse. Of course I wasn’t really acquainted with poetry at that stage of my life, but it seemed to me that lingering lovingly over every single syllable is not really the best way to keep the attention of your audience. At first I found him tedious. Tedious descended rather rapidly into boring, and boring disintegrated into near despair. I rather theatrically rolled my eyes upward. Several of my suitors caught the hint immediately and moved in to rescue me.

Merot was still standing in the same place reciting as the crowd flowed away from him. He might have loved me, but he obviously loved himself more.

The other ladies in the room were growing increasingly discontented, I noticed. Despite their fairly obvious expressions of invitation, the dance floor remained deserted. My suitors evidently didn’t want to be distracted. Quite a few of the ladies pled headaches and quietly left the room. It might have been my imagination, but after they left I seemed to hear a gnawing sound – a sound that was remarkably like the sound of someone eating her own liver. There was a certain musical quality about that to my ears.

Then, as evening began to descend upon the Isle of the Winds, Taygon came up to join me. Taygon did not have to elbow his way through the crowd. Everybody got out of his way. He was big. He was burly. He was garbed in chain mail. He had a huge blond beard. He wore a sword. ‘Lady Polgara!’ he said in a booming voice, ‘I’ve been looking for you!’

That was ominous. ‘I’m Taygon the Warrior. I’m sure you’ve heard of me. My deeds are renowned throughout the length and breadth of Aloria.’

‘I’m terribly sorry, Lord Taygon,’ I apologized in mock confusion. ‘I grew up in almost total isolation, so I don’t really know what’s going on in the world – besides, I’m just a silly girl.’

‘I’ll kill any man who says so!’ He glared at the others threateningly.

How on earth was I going to deal with this barbarian? Then I made a mistake – one of several that day. ‘Ah –’ I floundered, ‘since I’ve been so out of touch, I’d be enthralled to hear of some of your exploits.’

Please be a little more forgiving. I was an absolute novice that day, after all.

‘My pleasure, Lady Polgara.’ It might have been his pleasure, but it certainly wasn’t mine. Did he have to be so graphic? As he spoke, I suddenly found myself awash in a sea of blood and looking out at an entire mountain range of loose brains. Brightly colored entrails snarled around my feet, and disconnected extremities floated by – twitching.

It was only by a supreme act of will that I was able to keep from throwing up all over the front of his chain-mail shirt.

Then dear, dear Kamion rescued me. ‘Excuse me, Sir Taygon, but Lady Polgara’s sister, our future queen, requires her presence. I know that we’ll all be made desolate by her absence, but a royal command cannot be disobeyed. I’m certain that a warrior of your vast experience can understand the importance of obeying orders.’

‘Oh, of course, Kamion,’ Taygon replied automatically. He bowed clumsily to me. ‘You must hurry, Lady Polgara. We mustn’t keep the Queen waiting.’

I curtsied to him, not trusting myself to answer. Then Kamion took my elbow and guided me away.

‘When you come back,’ Taygon called after me, ‘I’ll tell you about how I disemboweled an offensive Arend.’

‘I can hardly wait,’ I said rather weakly over my shoulder.

‘Do you really want to hear about it, my Lady?’ Kamion murmured to me.

‘Frankly, my dear Kamion, I’d sooner take poison’

He laughed. ‘I rather thought you might feel that way about it. Your face was definitely taking on a slight greenish cast there toward the end.’

Oh, Kamion was smooth. I began to admire him almost in spite of myself.

‘Well?’ my sister asked when I rejoined her, ‘how was it?’

‘Just wonderful!’ I replied exultantly. They were all smitten with me. I was the absolute center of attention.’

‘You’ve got a cruel streak in you, Polgara.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I’ve been cooped up in here all afternoon, and you’ve come back to rub my nose in all your conquests.’

‘Would I do that?’ I asked her archly.

‘Of course you would. I can see you absolutely running through the halls to get back so that you could gloat’ Then she laughed. ‘I’m sorry, Pol. I couldn’t resist that.’

‘You’re above all that now, Beldaran,’ I told her. ‘You’ve already caught the man you want. I’m still fishing.’

‘I’m not sure that I’m the one who really caught him. There were a lot of other people involved in that fishing trip, too: Aldur, father – mother, too, probably. The notion of an arranged marriage is just a little humiliating.’

‘You do love Riva, don’t you?’

‘Of course. It’s humiliating all the same. All right, tell me what happened. I want every single detail.’

I described my afternoon, and my sister and I spent a great deal of our time laughing. Even as I had, Beldaran particularly enjoyed the reaction of the Rivan girls.

That afternoon was my last unsupervised excursion into the untamed jungle of the adolescent mating ritual. From then on, father sat scowling in a spot where everybody could see him. It wasn’t really necessary, of course, but there was no way that father could know that mother was already keeping an eye on me. His presence did set certain limits on the enthusiasm of my suitors, and I was of two minds about that. None of my suitors were likely to go too far with him sitting there, but I was fairly sure that I could take care of myself, and father’s insistence on being present robbed me of the chance to find out if I could.

For some reason Kamion made father particularly nervous, and I couldn’t understand exactly why. Kamion had exquisite manners, and he never once did anything at all offensive. Why did my aged sire dislike him so much?

Got you that time, didn’t I, Old Wolf?

Then King Cherek and his sons, Dras Bull-neck and Algar Fleet-foot, arrived for the wedding, and things began to get just a bit more serious. Despite the way Beldaran and Riva felt about each other, my sister had been right. Theirs was an arranged marriage. The possibility that my father might also decide to arrange one for me – just to protect me from all those fawning suitors – raised its ugly head. There was in those days – probably even still existing – the idea that women are intellectually inferior to men. Men did – and many still do – automatically assume that women are empty-headed ninnies who’ll fall prey to the first glib young man who comes along with certain ideas in his mind. The result, of course, is the virtual imprisonment of almost all women of a certain rank. What my father and all those other primitives can’t seem to realize is that we’ll resent that imprisonment and go to almost any lengths to circumvent it. That might help to explain why so many girls become involved with inappropriate young men. In most cases the character of the young man doesn’t make a jot of difference. The girl in question is driven by a desire to show them that she can do it, rather than by empty-headed lust.

That’s frequently the reason for so many arranged marriages. The father marries his daughter off as soon as possible to ‘protect’ her. After she marries, any dalliances she chooses to take up to amuse herself are her husband’s problem.

The possibility that father might choose to shackle me to either Dras or Algar made me distinctly uneasy for a while.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.