‘Glad to be of help, Belgarath.’ Then he turned and bellowed, ‘Innkeeper! More ale!’

I went back out into the street and walked slowly back toward the temple of Chaldan, being careful not to think about Cherek’s bereavement. I had my own, and that filled my mind. I didn’t really want to dwell on it, since there was nobody around to chain me to a bed.

I’d received a few tentative invitations to visit the Duke in his palace, but I’d put them off with assorted vague excuses. I hadn’t visited the Duke of Vo Wacune, and I definitely didn’t want to show any favoritism. Given my probably undeserved celebrity, I decided not to have anything to do with any of those three contending Dukes. I had no desire to get involved in the Arendish civil wars - not even by implication.

That might have been a mistake. I could probably have saved Arendia several eons of suffering if I’d just called those three imbeciles together and rammed a peace-treaty down their throats. Considering the nature of Arends, however, they’d more than likely have violated the treaty before the ink was dry.

Anyway, I’d found out what I needed to know in Vo Astur, and the invitations from the Ducal Palace were becoming more and more insistent, so I thanked the priests for their hospitality and left town before daybreak the following morning. I’ve been leaving town before daybreak for longer than I care to think about.

I was almost certain that the Duke of Vo Astur would take my departure as a personal affront, so when I was a mile or so south of town, I went back into the woods a ways and took the form of the wolf.

Yes, it was painful. I wasn’t even certain that I could bring myself to do it, but it was time to find out. I’d been doing a number of things lately that pushed at the edges of my pain. I was not going to live out my life as an emotional cripple. Poledra wouldn’t have wanted that, and if I went mad, so what? One more mad wolf in the Arendish forest wouldn’t have made that much difference.

My assessment of the Duke of Vo Astur turned out to be quite accurate. I was ghosting southward along the edge of the woods about an hour later when a group of armed horsemen came pounding along that twisting road. The Asturian Duke really wanted me to pay him a visit. I drifted back in under the trees, dropped to my haunches, and watched the Duke’s men ride by. Arends were a much shorter people in those days than they are now, so they didn’t look too ridiculous on those stunted horses.

I traveled down through the forest and ultimately reached the plains of Mimbre. Unlike the Wacites and the Asturians, the Mimbrates had cleared away the woods of their domain almost completely. Mimbrate horses were larger than those of their northern cousins, and the nobles of that southern Duchy had already begun to develop the armor that characterizes them today. A mounted knight needs open ground to work on, so the trees had to go. The open farmland that resulted was rather peripheral to Mimbrate thinking.

When we think of the Arendish civil wars, we normally think of the three contending Duchies, but that wasn’t the full extent of it. Lesser nobles also had their little entertainments, and there was hardly a district in all of Mimbre that didn’t have its own ongoing feuds. I’d resumed my own form, although I’ll admit that I gave some serious consideration to living out the rest of my life as a wolf, and I was going south toward Vo Mimbre when I came across one of those feuds in full flower.

Unfortunately, the dim-witted Arends absolutely loved the idea of siege-engines. Arends have a formal turn of mind, and the prospect of a decades-long stand-off appeals to them enormously. The besiegers could set up camp around the walls of a fortress and mindlessly throw boulders at the walls for years, while the besieged could spend those same years happily piling rocks against the inside of those walls. Stalemates get boring after a while, though, and every so often, somebody felt the need to commit a few atrocities to offend his opponent.

In this particular case, the besieging baron decided to round up all the local serfs and behead them in plain view of the defender’s castle.

That’s when I took a hand in the game. As it happened, I was standing on a hilltop, and I posed dramatically there with my staff outstretched. ‘Stop!’ I roared, enhancing my voice to such an extent that they probably heard me in Nyissa. The baron and his knights wheeled to gape; the knight who was preparing to chop off a serf’s head paused momentarily to look at me, and then he raised his sword again.

He dropped it the next instant, however. It’s a little hard to hold on to a sword when the hilt turns white-hot in your hands. He danced around, howling and blowing on his burned fingers.

I descended the hill and confronted the murderous Mimbrate baron. ‘You will not perpetrate this outrage!’ I told him.

‘What I do is none of thy concern, old man,’ he replied, but he didn’t really sound very sure of himself.

‘I’m making it my concern! If you even attempt to harm these people, I’ll tear out your heart!’

‘Kill this old fool,’ the baron told one of his knights.

The knight dutifully reached for his sword, but I gathered my Will, leveled my staff, and said, ‘Swine.’

The knight immediately turned into a pig.

‘Sorcery!’ the baron gasped.

‘Precisely. Now pack up your people and go home - and turn those serfs loose.’

‘My cause is just,’ he asserted.

‘Your methods aren’t. Now get out of my sight, or you’ll grow a snout and a curly tail right where you stand.’

‘The practice of sorcery is forbidden in the realm of the Duke of Vo Mimbre,’ he told me - as if it made any difference.

‘Oh, really? How are you going to stop me?’ I pointed my staff at a nearby tree-stump and exploded it into splinters. ‘You’re pressing your luck, my Lord Baron. That could just as easily have been you. I told you to get out of my sight. Now do it before I lose my temper.’

‘Thou wilt regret this, Sorcerer.’

‘Not as much as you will if you don’t start moving right now.’ I gestured at the knight I’d just converted into ambulatory bacon, and he returned to his own form. His eyes were bulging with horror. He took one look at me and fled screaming.

The stubborn baron started to say something, but he evidently changed his mind. He ordered his men to mount up and then sullenly led them off toward the south.

‘You can go back to your homes,’ I told the serfs. Then I went back up to my hilltop to watch and to make sure that the baron didn’t try to circle back on me.

I suppose I could have done it differently. There hadn’t really been any need for that direct confrontation. I could have driven the baron and his knights off without ever revealing myself, but I’d lost my temper. I get into trouble that way fairly often.

Anyway, two days later I began to see lurid descriptions of a ‘foul sorcerer’ nailed to almost every tree I passed. The descriptions of me were fairly accurate, but the reward offered for my capture was insultingly small.

I decided at that point to go directly on to Tolnedra. I was certain that I could deal with any repercussions resulting from my display of bad temper, but why bother? Arendia was starting to bore me anyway, and I’ve been chased out of a lot of places in my time, so one more wasn’t going to make that much difference.

Chapter 19

I crossed the River Arend, the traditional border between Arendia and Tolnedra, early one morning in late spring. The north bank of the river was patrolled by Mimbrate knights, of course, but that wasn’t really any problem. I do have certain advantages, after all.

I paused for a time in the Forest of Vordue to give some thought to my situation. When my Master had roused me from my drunken stupor back in Camaar, he hadn’t really given me any instructions, so I was more or less on my own. There wasn’t any place I really had to go, and no particular urgency about getting there. I still felt my responsibilities, however. I suppose I was what you might call a disciple emeritus, a vagabond sorcerer wandering around poking my nose into things that were probably none of my business. If I happened to come across anything significant, I could pass it on to my brothers back in the Vale. Aside from that, I was free to wander wherever I chose. My grief hadn’t really diminished, but I was learning to live with it and to keep it rather tightly controlled. The years in Camaar had taught me the futility of trying to hide from it.

And so, filled with a kind of suppressed melancholy, I set off toward Tol Honeth. As long as I was here anyway, I thought I might as well find out what the empire was up to.

There was a certain amount of political maneuvering going on in the Grand Duchy of Vordue as I passed through on my way south. The Honeths were in power again, and the Vordue family always took that as a personal affront. There were abundant signs that the second Honethite Dynasty was in its twilight. That’s a peculiar thing about dynasties in any of the world’s kingdoms. The founder of a dynasty is usually vigorous and gifted, but as the centuries roll by, his successors become progressively less so. The fact that they almost invariably marry their cousins might have something to do with it. Controlled inbreeding might work out all right with horses and dogs and cattle, but when it comes to humans, keeping it in the family’s not a good idea. Bad traits will breed true the same as good ones will, and stupidity seems to float to the surface a lot faster than courage or brilliance.