Some time later, as the pale dawn crept steadily under the trees, Silk stood shivering on one side of the fire pit with his hands stretched out to the flames and his eyes suspiciously fixed on the bubbling pot Aunt Pol had set on a flat rock at the very edge of the fire. "Gruel?" he asked. "Again?"

"Hot porridge," Aunt Pol corrected, stirring the contents of the pot with a long-handled wooden spoon.

"They're the same thing, Polgara."

"Not really. Gruel is thinner."

"Thick or thin, it's all the same."

She looked at him with one raised eyebrow. "Tell me, Prince Kheldar, why are you always so disagreeable in the morning?"

"Because I detest mornings. The only reason there's such a thing as morning in the first place is to keep night and afternoon from bumping into each other."

"Perhaps one of my tonics might sweeten your blood."

His eyes grew wary. "Ah—no. Thanks all the same, Polgara. Now that I'm all the way awake, I feel much better."

"I'm so glad for you. Now, do you suppose you could move away a bit? I'm going to need that side of the fire for the bacon."

"Anything you say." And he turned and went quickly back into the shelter.

Belgarath, who was lounging on top of his blankets, looked at the little man with an amused expression. "For a supposedly intelligent man, you do have a tendency to blunder from time to time, don't you?" he asked. "You should have learned by now not to bother Pol when she's cooking."

Silk grunted and picked up his moth-eaten fur cape. "I think I'll go check the horses," he said. "Do you want to come along?"

Belgarath cast an appraising eye at Polgara's dwindling supply of firewood. "That might not be a bad idea," he agreed, rising to his feet.

'I'll go with you," Garion said. "I've got a few kinks I'd like to work out. I think I slept on a stump last night." He slung the loop of his sword belt across one shoulder and followed the other two out of the shelter.

"It's sort of hard to believe that it really happened, isn't it?" Silk murmured when they reached the clearing. "The dragon, I mean. Now that it's daylight, everything looks so prosaic."

"Not quite," Garion said, pointing at the scaly chunk of the dragon's tail lying on the far edge of the clearing. The tip end of it was still twitching slightly.

Silk nodded. "That is the sort of thing you wouldn't ordinarily run across on a casual morning stroll." He looked at Belgarath. "Is she likely to bother us again?" he asked. "This is going to be a very nervous journey if we have to keep looking back over our shoulders every step of the way. Is she at all vindictive?"

"How do you mean?" the old man asked him.

"Well, Garion did kind of cut her tail off, after all. Do you think she might take it personally?"

"Not usually," Belgarath replied. "She doesn't really have that much in the way of a brain." He frowned thoughtfully. "What bothers me is that there was something about the whole encounter that was all wrong."

"Even the idea of it was wrong," Silk shuddered.

Belgarath shook his head. "That's not what I mean. I can't be sure if I imagined it or not, but she seemed to be looking specifically for one of us."

"Eriond?" Garion suggested.

"It sort of seemed that way, didn't it? But when she found him, she looked almost as if he frightened her. And what did he mean by those peculiar things he said to her?"

"Who knows?" Silk shrugged. "He's always been a strange boy. I don't think he lives in the same world with the rest of us."

"But why was the dragon so afraid of Garion's sword?"

"That sword frightens whole armies, Belgarath. The fire alone is pretty terrifying."

"She likes fire, Silk. I've seen her try to be coy and seductive for the benefit of a burning barn, and one time she flew around for a week making calves' eyes at a forest fire.

There's something about last night that keeps nagging at me."

Eriond came out of the thicket where the horses were picketed, walking carefully around the dripping bushes.

"Are they all right?" Garion asked.

"The horses? They're fine, Belgarion. Is breakfast almost ready?"

"If that's what you want to call it," Silk replied sourly.

"Polgara's really a very good cook, Kheldar," Eriond assured him earnestly.

"Not even the best cook in the world can do very much with porridge."

Eriond's eyes brightened. "She's making porridge? I love porridge."

Silk gave him a long look, then turned sadly to Garion. "You see how easily the young are corrupted?" he observed. "Just give them the faintest hint of a wholesome upbringing, and they're lost forever." He squared his shoulders. "All right," he said grimly, "let's go get it over with."

After breakfast, they broke down their night's encampment and set out through the soft drizzle falling from the weeping sky. It was about noon when they reached a wide swath of cleared land, a stretch of bushy, stump-dotted ground perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, and in the center of that swath lay. a wide, muddy road.

"The high road from Muros," Silk said with some satisfaction.

"Why did they cut down all the trees?" Eriond asked him.

"They used to have trouble with robbers lying in ambush right beside the road. The cleared space on each side gives travelers a sporting chance to get away."

They rode out from under the dripping trees and across the weed-grown clearing to the muddy road. "Now we should be able to make better time," Belgarath said, nudging his horse into a trot.

They followed the road south for several hours, moving at a steady canter. As they rode down out of the forested foothills, the trees gave way to roiling grasslands. They crested a hilltop and reined in to give their steaming mounts a brief rest. Somewhat to the northwest they saw the dark border of the great Arendish forest, hazy in the misty drizzle, and not far ahead the grim, gray-walled pile of Mimbrate castle brooding down on the grasslands lying below.

Ce'Nedra sighed as she stared out over the sodden plain and at the fortress that seemed to hold in its very stones all the stiff-necked, wary suspicion that was at the core of Arendish society.

"Are you all right?" Garion asked her, fearful that her sigh might signify a return to that bleak melancholy which she had so recently shaken off.

"There's something so mournful about Arendia," she replied. "All those thousands of years of hatred and grief, and what did they prove? Even that castle seems to be weeping.''