Ce’Nedra moved quickly to head off any incipient bickering. ‘We could make an inspection tour,’ she suggested archly.
‘Ce’Nedra, we’ve looked at every blockhouse and every hut within the walls a dozen times already,’ Adara said with some asperity, ‘and if I have some polite old sergeant explain the workings of a catapult to me one more time, I think I’ll scream.’
‘We have not, however, inspected the outer fortifications, have we?’ the princess asked slyly. ‘Wouldn’t you say that’s part of our duty too?’
Adara looked at her quickly, and then a slow smile appeared on her face. ‘Absolutely,’ she agreed. ‘I’m surprised that we hadn’t thought of that before. We’ve been most neglectful, haven’t we?’
Ariana’s face took on a worried frown. ‘King Rhodar, I fear, would be most strenuous in his objections to such a plan.’
‘Rhodar isn’t here,’ Ce’Nedra pointed out. ‘He’s off with King Fulrach taking an inventory of the supply dumps.’
‘Lady Polgara would most certainly not approve,’ Ariana suggested, though her tone indicated that she was weakening.
‘Lady Polgara is conferring with Beldin the sorcerer,’ Adara mentioned, her eyes dancing mischievously.
Ce’Nedra smirked. ‘That rather leaves us to our own devices, doesn’t it, ladies?’
‘We shall be soundly scolded upon our return,’ Ariana said.
‘And we will all be very contrite, won’t we?’ Ce’Nedra giggled.
A quarter of an hour later, the princess and her two friends, dressed in soft black leather Algar riding clothes, passed at a canter out through the central gate of the vast fort. They were accompanied by Olban, the youngest son of the Rivan Warder. Olban had not liked the idea, but Ce’Nedra had given him no time to object and definitely no time to send a message to anyone who could step in and stop the whole excursion. Olban looked worried, but, as always, he accompanied the little Rivan Queen without question.
The stake-studded trenches in front of the walls were very interesting, but one trench looked much like another, and it took a rare mind indeed to find much pleasure in the finer points of excavation.
‘Very nice,’ Ce’Nedra said brightly to a Drasnian pikeman standing guard atop a high mound of dirt. ‘Splendid ditches – and all those excellently sharp stakes.’ She looked out at the arid landscape before the fortifications. ‘Where did you ever find all the wood for them?’
‘The Sendars brought it in, your Majesty,’ he replied, ‘from someplace up north, I think. We had the Thulls cut and sharpen the stakes for us. They’re quite good stake-makers – if you tell them what you want.’
‘Didn’t a mounted patrol go out this way about a half an hour ago?’ Ce’Nedra asked him.
‘Yes, your Majesty. Lord Hettar of Algaria and some of his men. They went off that way.’ The guard pointed toward the south.
‘Ah,’ Ce’Nedra said. ‘If anyone should ask, tell them that we’re going out to join him. We should return in a few hours.’
The guard looked a bit dubious about that, but Ce’Nedra moved quickly to head off any objections. ‘Lord Hettar promised to wait for us just beyond the south end of the fortifications,’ she told him. She turned to her companions. ‘We really mustn’t keep him waiting too long. You ladies took absolutely too much time changing clothes.’ She smiled winsomely at the guard. ‘You know how it is,’ she said. ‘The riding habit must be just so, and the hair absolutely has to be brushed one last time. Sometimes it takes for ever. Come along, ladies. We must hurry, or Lord Hettar will be vexed with us.’ With a brainless little giggle, the princess wheeled Noble and rode south at a gallop.
‘Ce’Nedra,’ Ariana exclaimed in a shocked voice once they were out of earshot, ‘you lied to him.’
‘Of course.’
‘But that’s dreadful.’
‘Not nearly as dreadful as spending another day embroidering daisies on a stupid petticoat,’ the princess replied.
They left the fortifications and crossed a low, burned-brown string of hills. The broad valley beyond was enormous. Dun brown and treeless mountains reared up fully twenty miles away at the valley’s far end. They cantered down into that vast emptiness, feeling dwarfed into insignificance by the colossal landscape. Their horses seemed no more than ants crawling toward the indifferent mountains.
‘I hadn’t realized it was so big,’ Ce’Nedra murmured, shading her eyes to gaze at the distant hilltops.
The floor of the valley was as flat as a tabletop, and it was only sparsely sprinkled with low, thorny bushes. The ground was scattered with round, fist-sized rocks, and the dust spurted, yellow and powdery, from each step of their horses’ hoofs. Although it was scarcely midmorning, the sun was already a furnace, and shimmering heatwaves rippled the valley floor ahead, making the dusty, gray-green bushes seem to dance in the windless air.
It grew hotter. There was no trace of moisture anywhere, and the sweat dried almost instantly on the flanks of their panting horses.
‘I think we should give some thought to going back,’ Adara said, reining in her mount. ‘There’s no way we can reach those hills at the end of the valley.’
‘She’s right, your Majesty,’ Olban told the princess. ‘We’ve already come too far.’
Ce’Nedra pulled Noble to a stop, and the white horse drooped his head as if on the verge of absolute exhaustion. ‘Oh, quit feeling sorry for yourself,’ she chided him irritably. This was not going at all as she had expected. She looked around. ‘I wonder if we could find some shade somewhere,’ she said. Her lips were dry, and the sun seemed to hammer down on her unprotected head.
‘The terrain doth not suggest such comfort, princess,’ Ariana said, looking around at the flat emptiness of the rock-strewn valley floor.
‘Did anyone think to bring any water?’ Ce’Nedra asked, dabbing at her forehead with a kerchief.
No-one had.
‘Maybe we should go back,’ she decided, looking about rather regretfully. ‘There’s nothing to see out here, anyway.’
‘Riders coming,’ Adara said sharply, pointing toward a mounted group of men emerging from an indented gulley that lay like a fold on the flanks of a rounded hill a mile or so away.
‘Murgos?’ Olban demanded with a sharp intake of his breath. His hand went immediately to his sword.
Adara raised her hand to shade her eyes and stared at the approaching horsemen intently. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘They’re Algars. I can tell by the way they ride.’
‘I hope they have some water with them,’ Ce’Nedra said.
The dozen or so Algar riders rode directly toward them with a great cloud of yellow dust rising behind them. Adara suddenly gasped, and her face went very pale.
‘What is it?’ Ce’Nedra asked her.
‘Lord Hettar is with them,’ Adara said in a choked voice.
‘How can you possibly recognize anybody at that distance?’
Adara bit her lip, but did not reply.
Hettar’s face was fierce and unforgiving as he reined in his sweating horse. ‘What are you doing out here?’ he demanded bluntly. His hawk-like face and black scalp lock gave him a wild, even frightening appearance.
‘We thought we’d go riding, Lord Hettar,’ Ce’Nedra replied brightly, trying to outface him.
Hettar ignored that. ‘Have you lost your mind, Olban?’ he harshly asked the young Rivan. ‘Why did you permit the ladies to leave the forts?’
‘I do not tell her Majesty what to do,’ Olban answered stiffly, his face red.
‘Oh, come now, Hettar,’ Ce’Nedra protested. ‘What’s the harm in our taking a little ride?’
‘We killed three Murgos not a mile from here just yesterday,’ Hettar told her. ‘If you want exercise, run around the inside of the forts for a few hours. Don’t just ride out unprotected in hostile territory. You’ve acted very foolishly, Ce’Nedra. We’ll go back now.’ His face was grim as a winter sea, and his tone left no room for discussion.
&nbs
p; ‘We had just made the same decision, my Lord,’ Adara murmured, her eyes downcast.
Hettar looked sternly at the condition of their horses. ‘You’re an Algar, Lady Adara,’ he said pointedly. ‘Didn’t it occur to you to bring water for your mounts? Surely you know better than to take a horse out in this kind of heat without any precautions at all.’
Adara’s pale face grew stricken.
Hettar shook his head in disgust. ‘Water their horses,’ he curtly told one of his men, ‘and then we’ll escort them back. Your excursion is over, ladies.’
Adara’s face was flaming with a look of almost unbearable shame. She twisted this way and that in her saddle, trying to avoid Hettar’s stern, unforgiving stare. No sooner had her horse been watered than she jerked her reins and dug her heels into his flanks. Her startled mount scrambled his hoofs in the gravel and leaped away, running back the way they had come across the rock-littered valley floor.
Hettar swore and drove his mount after her.
‘Whatever is she doing?’ Ce’Nedra exclaimed.
‘Lord Hettar’s rebuke hath stung our gentle companion beyond her endurance,’ Ariana observed. ‘His good opinion is dearer to her than her life itself.’
‘Hettar?’ Ce’Nedra was stunned.
‘Hath not thine eye informed thee how it doth stand with our dear friend?’ Ariana asked in mild surprise. ‘Thou art strangely unobservant, Princess.’
‘Hettar?’ Ce’Nedra repeated. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Mayhap it is because I am Mimbrate,’ Ariana concluded. ‘The ladies of my people are most sensitive to the signs of gentle affection in others.’
It took perhaps a hundred yards for Hettar to overtake Adara’s plunging horse. He seized her reins in one fist and jerked her roughly to a stop, speaking sharply to her, demanding to know what she was doing. Adara twisted this way and that in her saddle, trying to keep him from seeing her face as he continued to chide her.
Then a flicker of movement no more than twenty feet from the two of them caught Ce’Nedra’s eye. Astonishingly, a mail-shirted Murgo rose up out of the sand between two scrubby bushes, shaking off the sheet of brown-splotched canvas beneath which he had lain concealed. As he rose, his short bow was already drawn.
‘Hettar!’ Ce’Nedra screamed as the Murgo raised his bow.
Hettar’s back was to the Murgo, but Adara saw the man aiming his arrow at the Algar’s unprotected back. With a desperate move, she ripped her reins from Hettar’s grip and drove her horse into his. His mount lurched back, stumbled and fell, throwing the unprepared man to the ground even as Adara, flailing her horse’s flanks with the ends of her reins, plunged directly at the Murgo.
With only the faintest flicker of annoyance, the Murgo released his arrow at the charging girl.
Even at that distance, Ce’Nedra could hear the distinct sound the arrow made when it struck Adara. It was a sound she would remember with horror for the remainder of her life. Adara doubled sharply, her free hand clutching at the arrow buried low in her chest, but her plunging gallop did not falter nor change as she rode the Murgo down. He tumbled and rolled beneath the churning hoofs of her horse, then lurched again to his feet as soon as she had passed over him, his hand jerking at his sheathed sword. But Hettar was already upon him, sabre flashing in the glaring sunlight. The Murgo screamed once as he fell.
Hettar, his dripping sabre still in his hand, turned angrily to Adara. ‘What a stupid thing,’ he roared at her, but his shout cut off suddenly. Her horse had come to a stop a few yards beyond the Murgo, and she drooped in her saddle, her dark hair falling like a veil across her pale face and both of her hands pressed to her chest. Then, slowly, she toppled from her saddle.
With a strangled cry, Hettar dropped his sabre and ran to her.
‘Adara!’ the princess wailed, her hands going to her face in horror even as Hettar gently turned the stricken girl over. The arrow, still standing out of her lower chest, throbbed with the rhythm of her faltering heart-beat.
When the rest of them reached the pair, Hettar was holding Adara in his arms, staring into her pale face with a stricken look. ‘You little fool,’ he was murmuring in a broken voice. ‘You little fool.’
Ariana slid from her saddle even before her horse stopped moving and ran to Hettar’s side. ‘Do not move her, my Lord,’ she told him sharply. ‘The arrow hath pierced her lung, and shouldst thou move her, it’s keen edge will gash out her life.’
‘Take it out,’ Hettar said from between clenched teeth.
‘Nay, my Lord. To pull the arrow now will do more damage than to leave it.’
‘I can’t bear to see it sticking out of her like that,’ he almost sobbed.
‘Then don’t look, my Lord,’ Ariana said bluntly, kneeling beside Adara and placing a cool, professional hand on the wounded girl’s throat.
‘She’s not dead, is she?’ Hettar almost begged.
Ariana shook her head. ‘Gravely wounded, but her life doth still pulse within her. Instruct thy men to improvise a litter at once, my Lord. We must convey our dear friend to the fortress and Lady Polgara’s ministrations immediately, lest her life drain away.’
‘Can’t you do something?’ he croaked.
‘Not here in this sun-blasted desolation, my Lord. I have neither instruments nor medications, and the wound may be past my skill. The Lady Polgara is her only hope. The litter, my Lord. Quickly!’
Polgara’s face was somber, and her eyes as hard as flint when she emerged from Adara’s sickroom late that afternoon.
‘How is she?’ Hettar demanded. He had been pacing up and down in the main corridor of the blockhouse for hours, stopping every so often to strike savagely at the crudely built stone walls with his impotent fists.
‘Somewhat improved,’ Polgara replied. ‘The crisis is past, but she’s still terribly weak. She’s asking for you.’
‘She will recover, won’t she?’ Hettar’s question had a note of fear in it.
‘Probably – if there aren’t any complications. She’s young, and the wound looked more serious than it actually was. I gave her something that will make her very talkative, but don’t stay too long. She needs rest.’ Polgara’s eyes moved to Ce’Nedra’s tear-streaked face. ‘Come to my room after you’ve seen her, your Majesty,’ she said firmly. ‘You and I have something to discuss.’
Adara’s porcelain face was framed by the tumbled mass of her dark brown hair spreading across the pillow. She was very pale, but, though her eyes had a slightly unfocused look about them, they were very bright. Ariana sat quietly at the bedside.
‘How do you feel, Adara?’ Ce’Nedra asked in the quiet but cheerful voice one always assumes with the sick.
Adara gave her a wan little smile.
‘Are you in any pain?’
‘No,’ Adara’s voice had a little dying fall to it. ‘No pain, but I feel very light-headed and strange.’
‘Why did you do that, Adara?’ Hettar asked very directly. ‘You didn’t have to ride right at the Murgo like that.’
‘You spend too much time with horses, my Lord Sha-dar,’ Adara told him with a faint smile. ‘You’ve forgotten how to understand the feelings of your own kind.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ He sounded puzzled.
‘Exactly what it says, my Lord Hettar. If a mare looked admiringly at a stallion, you’d know how things stood immediately, wouldn’t you? But when it comes to people, you simply can’t see at all, can you?’ She coughed weakly.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked sharply.
‘I’m surprisingly well – considering the fact that I’m dying.’
‘What are you talking about? You’re not dying.’
She smiled slightly. ‘Please don’t,’ she told him. ‘I know what an arrow in the chest means. That’s why I wanted to see you. I wanted to look at your face once more. I’ve been watching your face for such a long time now.’
‘You’re tired,’ he said brusquely. ‘You’ll feel better afte
r you’ve slept.’
‘I’ll sleep, all right,’ she said ruefully, ‘but I doubt that I’ll feel anything afterward. The sleep I’m going to is the sleep one doesn’t wake up from.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Of course it is, but it’s true nonetheless.’ She sighed. ‘Well, dear Hettar, you’ve finally escaped me, haven’t you? I gave you a good chase, though. I even asked Garion to see if he could use sorcery on you.’
‘Garion?’
She nodded slightly. ‘You see how desperate I was? He said he couldn’t, though.’ She made a little face. ‘What good is sorcery if you can’t use it to make someone fall in love?’
‘Love?’ he repeated in a startled voice.
‘What did you think we were talking about, Lord Hettar? The weather?’ She smiled fondly at him. ‘Sometimes you can be impossibly dense.’
He stared at her in amazement.
‘Don’t be alarmed, my Lord. In a little while, I’ll stop chasing you, and you’ll be free.’
‘We’ll talk about that when you’re better,’ he told her gravely.
‘I’m not going to get better. Haven’t you been listening? I’m dying, Hettar.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact, you’re not dying. Polgara assured us that you’re going to be all right.’
Adara looked quickly at Ariana.
‘Thine injury is not mortal, dear friend,’ Ariana confirmed gently. ‘Truly, thou art not dying.’
Adara closed her eyes. ‘How inconvenient,’ she murmured, a faint blush coming to her cheeks. She opened her eyes again. ‘I apologize, Hettar. I wouldn’t have said any of this if I’d known that my meddling physicians were going to save my life. As soon as I’m up and about, I’ll return to my own clan. I won’t bother you again with my foolish outbursts.’
Hettar looked down at her, his hard-angled face expressionless. ‘I don’t think I’d like that,’ he told her, gently taking her hand. ‘There are things you and I need to talk about. This isn’t the time or the place, but don’t go trying to make yourself inaccessible.’
‘You’re just being kind.’ She sighed.