than fulfilled. Though she was only thirteen, she was breathtakingly
beautiful.
Her hair was the color of flax, and it was full and very long. Her
face could quite literally stop your heart, and she was as graceful as
a gazelle.
“Father!” she exclaimed when I reached the top of the stairs. Her
voice was rich and vibrant, the kind of voice that makes you hold your
breath to listen. She flew across the floor and threw herself into my
arms.
I cursed that wasted twelve years when she did that, and all of my love
for her came back, almost overwhelming me. We stood locked in an
embrace with tears streaming down our faces.
“Well, Old Wolf,” another voice said acidly,
“I see you’ve finally decided to come back to the scene of the
crime.”
I winced. Then I sighed, took my arms from around Beldaran’s slender
shoulders, and turned to face Polgara.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Beldaran was probably the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, but
Polgara, to put it kindly, was no prize.
Her dark hair was a tangled wreck with twigs and leaves snarled in it.
She was tall and skinny and quite nearly as dirty as Beldin. She had
knobby knees –usually skinned up– and her dirty fingernails were
ragged and chewed off close. It took her years to train herself not to
bite her nails. The white lock at her brow was scarcely visible, since
her hair was absolutely filthy. I got the strong impression that it
was all quite deliberate. Polgara’s got very good eyes, and I’m
certain that she could see that she was no match for her sister when it
came to sheer physical beauty. For some obscure reason, she seemed to
be going out of her way to make herself as ugly as she possibly could.
She was succeeding admirably.
Yes, I know. We’ll get to her transformation all in good time. Don’t
rush me.
It wasn’t her physical appearance that made our reunion so unpleasant,
though. Beldin had raised Polgara and Beldaran. Somehow my younger
daughter had avoided picking up his speech patterns, but Polgara
hadn’t.
She had them all–with bells on.
“It’s good to see you again, Polgara,” I greeted her, trying to sound
as if I meant it.
“Really? Why don’t we see if we can fix that? Did they stop making
beer in Camaar? Is that why you left?”
I sighed. This promised to be moderately ugly.
“Do you suppose we should kiss each other before we get into all that?”
I suggested.
“It’s not going to pay you to get that close to me, Old Man. I didn’t
like you when I first saw you, and you haven’t done anything lately to
change my opinion.”
“That’s all over now.”
“Of course it is–right up until the moment you get a sniff of beer or
see a passing skirt.”
“Have you been telling tales?” I asked Beldin.
“Not me,” he replied.
“Pol has her own ways to keep track of what you’ve been up to.”
“Shut up, uncle,” she snapped at him.
“This drunken fool doesn’t need to know about that.”
“You’re wrong, Pol,” I told her.
“This drunken fool does need to know about it. If you’re gifted,
you’re going to need training.”
“Not from you, father. I don’t need anything from you. Why don’t you
go back to Camaar? Or the Wood of the Dryads? It’s almost mating
season there again. Beldaran and I’d just adore having a horde of
half-human baby sisters.”
“Watch your mouth, Pol.”
“Why? We’re father and daughter, old man. We should always be
completely open with each other. I wouldn’t want you to have any
misconceptions about my opinion of you. Have you dallied with a Troll
yet? Or an Eldrak? That would really be exciting, wouldn’t it?”
I gave up and sat down in a chair.
“Go ahead, Pol,” I told her.
“Enjoy yourself.”
I’m sure she did. She’d spent years polishing some of those cutting
remarks, and she delivered them with a certain flair. Leaving the
girls in Beldin’s custody may have been a mistake, because Polgara at
least had been a very apt pupil. Some of the names she called me were
truly hair-raising. Oddly, Beldaran didn’t seem to be the slightest
bit offended by her sister’s choice of language. I’m sure she knew
what the words meant, but they didn’t seem to bother her. For all I
knew, she may have shared Pol’s views, but she forgave me. Polgara
obviously didn’t.
I sat there looking out the window at the sunset while my daughter
continued her diatribe. After an hour or so, she started to repeat
herself.
There are only so many insults in any language. She did lapse into
Ulgo once or twice, but her accent wasn’t very good. I corrected her,
of course; correcting the children is a father’s first responsibility.
Pol didn’t take correction very graciously.
Finally I stood up.
“This isn’t really getting us anywhere,” I told her.
“I think I’ll go home now. As soon as I get things straightened up in
the tower, you girls can move in with me.”
“You’re not serious!”
“Oh, yes I am, Pol. Start packing. Like it or not, we are going to be
a family.” I smiled at her.
“Sleep well, Polgara.” Then I left.
I could still hear her screaming when I got to my tower, The girls
moved in the following week. Beldaran was an obedient child, and she
accepted my decision without question. That, of course, forced Pol to
obey, as well, since she loved her sister so much that she couldn’t
bear to be separated from her. We didn’t see very much of her, but at
least her things were in my tower.
She spent most of her time for the rest of that summer in the branches
of the tree in the center of the Vale. At first I assumed that
eventually hunger would bring her down out of the tree and back to my
tower, but I had overlooked the twins’ habit of feeding things. They
saw to it that Polgara didn’t go hungry.
I decided to wait her out. If nothing else, winter would bring her
inside. Beldaran, however, started moping. That must have been a very
difficult time for my blonde daughter. She loved us both, and our
dislike for each other obviously caused her a great deal of distress.
She begged me to try to make peace with her sister. I knew it was a
mistake, but I couldn’t refuse Beldaran anything she asked of me, so I
sighed and went down the Vale to give it one more try.
It was a warm, sunny morning in late summer, and it seemed to me that
there were an unusual number of birds flying around as I walked through
the tall grass toward the tree.
There were even more of them about when I got there. The air around
the tree was alive with them–and it wasn’t just one variety. There
were robins and bluebirds and sparrows and finches and larks, and the
sound of all that chirping and singing was almost deafening.
Polgara was lounging in the fork of a huge branch about twenty feet up
with birds all around her, and she watched my approach with cold,
unfriendly eyes.
“What is it, father?” she demanded when I reached the foot of the
tree.
“Don’t you think this has gone on long enough?” I asked her.
“This what?”
“You’re being childish, Pol.”
“I’m entitled to be childish. I’m only thirteen. We’ll have a lot
more fun when I grow up.”
“You’re breaking Beldaran’s heart with this foolishness, you know.
She misses you very much.”
“She’s stronger than she looks. She can endure almost as much as I
can.” She absently shooed a warbling lark off her shoulder. The birds
around her were singing their hearts out in a kind of ecstatic
adoration.
I decided to try another tack.
“You’re missing a splendid opportunity, Pol,” I told her.
“Oh?”
“I’m sure you’ve spent the summer composing new speeches. You can’t
very well try them out on me when you’re perched on a limb sharpening
your beak.”
“We’ll get to that later, father. Right now the sight of you makes me
nauseous. Give me a few dozen years to get used to you.” She smiled
at me, a smile with all the warmth of an iceberg.
“Then we’ll talk. I have many, many things to say to you. Now go
away.”
To this day I don’t know how she did it. I didn’t hear or feel a
thing, but the sounds those thousands of birds were making suddenly
became angry, threatening, and they descended on me like a cloud,
stabbing at me with their beaks and flogging me with their wings. I
tried to beat them off with my hands, but you can’t really drive off
that many birds. About all the songbirds could do was peck at me and