I sighed.
“Don’t be coy, Arthon,” I told him wearily.
“The Church is not supposed to get involved in politics. You’ve been
taking bribes, haven’t you?”
“How did you know that?” His voice was a little shrill.
“I can read you like a book, Arthon. Give the money back and keep your
nose out of politics.”
“You must pay a call on the Emperor,” he said, skillfully sidestepping
the issue.
“I’ve met members of the Honeth family before. One’s pretty much the
same as the others.”
“His Majesty will be offended if you don’t call on him.”
“Spare him the anguish then. Don’t tell him that I’ve been here.”
He wouldn’t hear of that, of course. He definitely didn’t want me to
start probing into the question of who was bribing him, nor of how
large his share of the admission fees was, so he escorted me to the
palace, which was teeming with members of the Honeth family. Patronage
is the absolute soul of Tolnedran politics. Even the toll-takers at
the most remote bridges in the empire change when a new dynasty comes
into power.
The current Emperor was Ran Honeth the Twenty-something or other, and
he’d discarded imbecility in favor of the unexplored territory of
idiocy. As is usually the case in such situations, an officious
relative had assumed his defective kinsman’s authority, scrupulously
prefacing each of his personal decrees with
“The Emperor has decided . . .” or some other absurdity, thus
maintaining the dignity of the cretin on the throne.
The relative, a nephew in this case, kept Arthon and me cooling our
heels in an anteroom for two days while he escorted all manner of
high-ranking Tolnedrans immediately into the imperial presence.
Eventually I got tired of it.
“Let’s go, Arthon,” I told Nedra’s priest.
“We both have better things to do.”
“We cannot!” Arthon gasped.
“It would be considered a mortal insult!”
“So? I’ve insulted Gods in my time, Arthon. I’m not going to worry
about hurting the feelings of a half-wit.”
“Let me talk with the Lord High Chamberlain again.” He jumped to his
feet and hurried across the room to speak with the imperial nephew.
The nephew was a typical Honeth. His first response was to look down
his nose at me.
“You will await his Imperial Majesty’s pleasure,” he told me in a lofty
tone.
Since he was feeling so lofty, I stood him on a vacant patch of empty
air up near the rafters so that he could really look down on people.
I’ll grant you that it was petty, but then so was he.
“Do you think that his Imperial Majesty’s pleasure might have worked
its way around to us yet, old boy?” I asked him in a pleasant tone. I
left him up there for a little while to make sure that he got my point,
and then I brought him down again.
We got in to see the Emperor immediately.
This particular Ran Honeth was sitting on the Imperial Throne sucking
his thumb. The bloodline had deteriorated even further than I’d
imagined. I nudged at the corner of his mind and didn’t find anything
in there. He haltingly recited a few imperial pleasantries–I shudder
to think of how long it must have taken him to memorize them–and then
he regally gave Arthon and me permission to withdraw. His entire
performance was somewhat marred by the fact that forty some-odd years
of sucking his thumb had grossly misaligned his front teeth. He looked
like a rabbit, and he lisped outrageously.
I assessed the mood of the imperial nephew as Arthon and I bowed our
way out of the throne room, and I decided that it might be a good time
for me to leave Tol Honeth. As soon as the fellow regained his
composure, the trees in the neighborhood were almost certainly going to
flower with more of those posters. This was getting to be a habit.
I thought about that as I made my way toward Tol Borune. Ever since
I’d abandoned my career as a common drunk, I’d been misusing my gift.
The Will and the Word is a fairly serious thing, and I’d been turning
it into a bad joke. Despite my grief, I was still my Master’s
disciple, not some itinerant trickster. I suppose I could excuse
myself by pointing to my emotional state during those awful years, but
I don’t think I will. I’m supposed to know better.
I bypassed Tol Borune, largely to avoid any more opportunities to turn
offensive people into pigs or to stick them up in the air just for
fun.
That was probably a good idea; I’m sure the Borunes would have
irritated me. I’ve got a fair amount of respect for the Borune family,
but they can be awfully pig-headed sometimes.
Sorry, Ce’Nedra. Nothing personal intended there.
At any rate, I traveled through the lands of the Anadile family and
finally reached the northern edge of the Wood of the Dryads. The
passing centuries have altered the countryside down there to some
degree, but now that I think back on it, I followed almost exactly the
same route as I did three thousand years later when a group of friends
and I were going south on the trail of the Orb. Garion and I have
talked about “repetitions” any number of times, and this may have been
another of those signals that the purpose of the universe had been
disrupted. Then again, the fact that I followed the same route might
have been due to the fact that it was the natural way south and also
that I was familiar with it. Once you get a theory stuck in your head,
you’ll go to almost any lengths to twist things around to make them
fit.
Even in those days the Wood of the Dryads was an ancient oak forest
with a strange kind of serene holiness about it. Humans have a
tendency to compartmentalize their religion to keep it separate from
everyday life.
The Dryads live in the center of their religion, so they don’t even
have to think–or talk–about it. That’s sort of refreshing.
I’d been in their wood for more than a week before I even saw a Dryad.
They’re timid little creatures, and they don’t really care to come into
contact with outsiders–except at certain times of the year. Dryads
are all females, of course, so they’re obliged to have occasional
contacts with the males–of various species–in order to reproduce.
I’m sure you get the picture.
I didn’t really make an effort to find any Dryads. Technically,
they’re “monsters,” though certainly not as dangerous as the Eldrakyn
or Algroths, but I still didn’t want any incidents.
Evidently, though, it was “that time of year” for the first Dryad I
encountered, because she’d laid aside her customary shyness and was
aggressively trying to track me down. When I first saw her, she was
standing in the middle of the forest path I was following. She had
flaming red hair, and she was no bigger than a minute. She was,
however, holding a fully drawn bow, and her arrow was pointed directly
at my heart.
“You’d better stop,” she advised me.
I did that–immediately.
Once she was certain that I wasn’t going to try to run, she became very
friendly. She told me that her name was Xana, and that she had plans
for me. She even apologized for the bow. She explained it by telling
me that travelers were rare in the Wood, and that a Dryad with certain
things on her mind had to take some precautions to prevent escapes.
I tried to explain to her that what she was proposing was wildly
inappropriate, but I couldn’t seem to get through to her. She was a
very determined little creature.
I think I’ll just let it go at that. What happened next isn’t central
to the story I’m telling, and there’s no point in being deliberately
offensive.
Dryads customarily share things with their sisters, so Xana introduced
me to other Dryads, as well. They all pampered me, but there was no
getting around the fact that I was a captive–a slave, if we want to be
blunt about it–and my situation was more than a little degrading. I
didn’t make an issue of it, though. I smiled a lot, did what was
expected of me, and waited for an opportunity. As soon as I had a
moment alone, I slipped into the form of the wolf and loped off into
the wood. They searched for me, of course, but they didn’t know what
they were looking for, so I had no trouble evading them.
I reached the north bank of the River of the Woods, swam across, and
shook the water out of my fur. You might want to keep that in mind: if
you take the form of a furred creature and you happen to get wet before
you change back, always shake off the excess water first. Otherwise,