‘Be serious, Pol. You’re not old.’

‘Darlin’ boy,’ I said, fondly patting his cheek. ‘In actuality, though, I just turned two thousand, eight hundred and sixty seven. Feel free to flaunt that number in Aren’s face. No woman in her right mind is jealous of an old crone.’

‘Anybody who calls you that will answer to me, Pol,’ he said fiercely.

‘We’re getting along better and better, Brand.’ I smiled at him. ‘This is just a subterfuge to pull Aren’s teeth before she bites you.’

‘I think you’re exaggerating the danger, Pol, but I’ll be guided by you in this matter.’

‘An’ aren’t y’ the dearest boy-o in th’ whole wide world t’ say so?’

‘I’m sorry, Pol, but I don’t understand why you’re speaking so oddly.’

‘It’s a long story, Brand – a very long story. Someday when we have lots of time, I’ll tell it to you.’

After father and I’d bullied the Alorn kings into moving their headquarters to Tol Honeth, he and I went to the Stronghold to have a look at the defenses.

There was an unpleasant surprise waiting for me when we reached the Stronghold. My recent meetings with Gods had filled me with the sense of Destiny and Purpose that implies order. It does not, however, take pure accident into account. Garel, heir to Iron-grip’s throne, had ridden out with some Algar friends to scout the surrounding grasslands for advance parties of the approaching invaders. Garel’s horse had stumbled, and Garel had been thrown from his saddle. Everyone who rides a horse falls off now and then. It’s embarrassing, but usually nothing more. This time, however, Garel landed wrong, and the fall broke his neck, killing him instantly.

His wife, Aravina, was nearly mad with grief, and her mother-in-law, Adana, seemed to be at her wits’ end trying to deal with that. My approach was somewhat simpler. I drugged Aravina into near insensibility and kept her that way. My primary concern – as always – was the little boy, Gelane. I’ve had a lot of practice comforting little boys over the centuries, so I knew what had to be done. Someday, perhaps, I’ll discover a way to deal with my own sorrow.

Torak’s army was approaching the Stronghold, however, so I didn’t really have the leisure to grieve. Gelane was almost six years old now, but that really isn’t very old. The current situation, however, dictated a break in tradition. I sat Gelane down and told him just exactly who he really was.

The childhood and early adolescence of an orphaned heir has always been the most dangerous time in my ongoing task. I’d taken an oath to defend and protect the Rivan line, and a five- or six-year-old boy whose father has died is the sole receptacle of that blood-line. Little girls are sensible. Their period of irrationality comes later. Little boys, on the other hand, become irrational almost as soon as they learn to walk. Garion, for example, took up rafting on a pond at Faldor’s farm without bothering to learn how to swim first. If I sometimes seem a bit hysterical, you can probably lay the blame for that condition on about fourteen centuries of trying to keep little boys from killing themselves. It was in the hope of impressing Gelane with the importance of being at least a little bit careful that I told him of his heritage, stressing the fact that if he managed to get himself killed, the line would die with him. He seemed to understand, but with little boys, you never really know.

Then came that rainy evening when mother’s voice pulled my attention from the passages of the Mrin Codex that seemed to concentrate on the current situation. ‘Polgara,’ she said in an oddly gentle tone, ‘it’s time. Come up to the northern battlements. I’ll meet you there.’

I laid the scroll aside and left my room deep inside the thick walls of the Stronghold to climb the seemingly endless stairs up to the parapet atop the mountainous structure.

It was drizzling rain, and there was just enough wind blowing to make things decidedly unpleasant up there. Mother, garbed in that plain brown peasant dress, stood at the battlements looking out into the rainy night. She was actually there, and I wasn’t as yet that accustomed to her real presence.

‘I’m here, mother,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she replied, her golden eyes a mystery. ‘Just relax, Pol. UL told me exactly what to do, so follow my lead as we do this.’

‘Of course.’ I was apprehensive, nonetheless.

‘It won’t hurt, Pol,’ she said, smiling faintly.

‘I know, but doing something for the first time always makes me just a little nervous.’

‘Look upon it as an adventure, Pol. Now, then, first we make the image of the owl, and the details have to match rather closely – down to the last feather, actually.’

It took us quite a while that first time. We were both familiar with the generic owl, but we had to reconcile a number of minute differences to form the image of an individual bird.

‘What do you think?’ mother asked after we’d dealt with several inconsistencies.

‘It looks owlish enough to me.’

‘I rather thought so myself. Now then, we have to do this simultaneously, so don’t hurry. The actual merger’s going to start before we enter the image. It begins in the instant we become fluid, or so UL tells me, and the merger’s almost complete before we go into the bird-shape.’

‘I think I see why, yes.’

‘This won’t be easy for you, Pol. I’ve been inside your mind often enough to be very familiar with you, but you’ll be encountering things you haven’t experienced before. I wasn’t born human, so there’s a lot of wolf left in me. I have a few instincts you probably won’t like.’

I smiled faintly. ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

‘All right, then. Let’s begin.’

I can’t really describe it, so I won’t even try. There’s a moment during the process of changing form that I hadn’t really paid much attention to. It’s that very brief instant when your entire being is in transition from your own form to that other one. Mother’s use of the term ‘fluid’ is really quite precise. In a sense, you’re melting down so that you can flow from one form to the other. It was at that point that mother and I merged, and it was our combined awareness that flowed into our owl.

Mother’s suggestion that I might find her a bit strange was a serious understatement, but I think she overlooked the fact that even though I’d never adopted the form of a wolf, I was, nonetheless, hereditarily part wolf myself at the deepest levels of my being.