“Yes, your Majesty?” the sentry said as Garion opened the door.
“Do you want to get me about a dozen or so pillows?”
“Of course, your Majesty.” The sentry started down the corridor.
“On second thought, make that two dozen.” Garion called after him. Then he went back to the bedroom.
“I mean it, Lady Polgara,” Ce’Nedra was saying in a weak little voice.” If it ever gets to the point where you have to make a choice, save my baby. Don’t even think about me.”
“I see,” Polgara replied gravely. “I hope you’ve purged yourself of that particular nonsense now.”
Ce’Nedra stared at her.
“Melodrama has always made me just ever so faintly nauseous.”
A slow flush crept up Ce’Nedra’s cheeks.
“That’s a very good sign,” Aunt Pol encouraged her. “If you can blush, it means that you’re well enough to take final note of trivial things.”
“Trivial?”
“Such as being embarrassed about how truly stupid that last statement of yours really was. Your baby’s fine, Ce’Nedra. In fact, he’s better off right now than you are. He’s sleeping at the moment.”
Ce’Nedra’s eyes had gone wide, and her hands were placed protectively over her abdomen. “You can see him?” she asked incredulously.
“See isn’t exactly the right word, dear,” Polgara said as she mixed two powders together in a glass. “I know what he’s doing and what he’s thinking about.” She added water to the mixture in the glass and watched critically as the contents bubbled and fumed. “Here,” she instructed, handing the glass to her patient, “Drink this.” Then she turned to Garion. “Build up the fire, dear. It’s autumn, after all, and we don’t want her getting chilled.”
Brand and Silk had rather carefully examined the broken body of the would-be assassin and had shifted their attention to her clothing by the time Garion joined them late that evening.
“Have you found out anything yet?” he asked as he entered the room.
“We know that she was an Alorn,” Brand replied in his rumbling voice. “About thirty-five years old, and she didn’t work for a living. At least she didn’t do anything strenuous enough to put calluses on her hands.”
“That’s not very much to go on,” Garion said.
“It’s a start,” Silk told him, carefully examining the hem of a bloodstained dress.
“It sort of points at the Bear-cult then, doesn’t it?”
“Not necessarily,” Silk replied, laying aside the dress and picking up a linen shift. “When you’re trying to hide your identity, you pick an assassin from another country. Of course, that kind of thinking might be a little too subtle for the Bear-cult.” He frowned. “Now, where have I seen this stitch before?” he muttered, still looking at the dead woman’s undergarment.
“I’m so very sorry about Arell,” Garion said to Brand. “We were all very fond of her.” It seemed like such an inadequate thing to say.
“She would have appreciated that, Belgarion,” Brand said quietly. “She loved Ce’Nedra very much.”
Garion turned back to Silk with a feeling of frustration boiling up in him. “What are we going to do?” he demanded. “If we can’t find out who was behind this, he’ll probably just try again.”
“I certainlyhope so,” Silk said.
“Youwhat?”
“We can save a lot of time if we can catch somebody who’s still alive. You can only get so much out of dead people.”
“I wish we’d been a little more thorough when we wiped out the Bear-cult at Thull Mardu,” Brand said.
“I wouldn’t get my mindtoo set on the notion that the Bear-cult was responsible for this,” Silk told him. “There are some other possibilities.”
“Who else would want to hurt Ce’Nedra?” Garion asked.
Silk sprawled in a chair, scratching absently at his cheek and with his forehead furrowed with thought. “Maybe it wasn’t Ce’Nedra,” he mused.
“What?”
“It’s altogether possible, you know, that the attempt was directed at the baby she’s carrying. There could be people out there in the world who do not want there to be an heir to Iron-grip’s throne.”
“Who?”
“The Grolims come to mind rather quickly,” Silk replied. “Or the Nyissans -or even a few Tolnedrans. I want to keep an open mind on the matter -until I find out a few more things.” He held up the stained undergarment. “I’m going to start with this. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to take it down to the city and show it to every tailor and seamstress I can find. I might be able to get something out of the weave, and there’s a peculiar kind of stitching along the hem. If I can find somebody to identify it for me, it might give us something to work on.”
Brand looked thoughtfully over at the still, blanket-draped form of the woman who had tried to kill Ce’Nedra. “She would have had to have entered the Citadel by way of one of the gates,” he mused. “That means that she passed a sentry and that she had to have given him some kind of excuse for coming in. I’ll round up every man who’s been on sentry duty for the past week and bring them all down here to have a look at her. Once we know exactly when she got in, maybe we can start to backtrack her. I’d like to find the ship she arrived on and have a talk with the captain.”
“What can I do?” Garion asked quickly.
“Probably you should stay close to Ce’Nedra’s room,” Silk suggested. “Any time Polgara leaves for any reason at all, you ought to go in and take her place. There could be other attempts, you know, and I think we’ll all feel better if Ce’Nedra’s guarded rather closely.”
Under Polgara’s watchful eyes, Ce’Nedra spent a quiet night, and her breathing was much stronger the next day. She complained bitterly about the taste of the medicines she was required to drink, and Polgara listened with a great show of interest to the queen’s extensive tirade. “Yes, dear,” she agreed pleasantly. “Now drink it all down.”
“Does it have to taste so awful?” Ce’Nedra said with a shudder.
“Of course it does. If medicine tasted good, sick people might be tempted to stay sick so that they could enjoy the medicine. The worse it tastes, the quicker you get well.”
Late that afternoon, Silk returned with a disgusted look on his face. “I hadn’t realized how many ways it’s possible to attach two pieces of cloth together,” he grumbled.
“No luck, I take it,” Garion said.
“Not really,” Silk replied, throwing himself into a chair. “I managed to pick up all sorts of educated guesses, though.”
“Oh?”
“One tailor was willing to stake his reputation on the fact that this particular stitch is used exclusively in Nyissa. A seamstress told me very confidently that this was an Ulgo garment. And one half-wit went so far as to say that the owner of the garment was a sailor, since this stitch isalways used to repair torn sails.”
“What are you talking about, Silk?” Polgara asked curiously as she passed through the sitting room on her way back to Ce’Nedra’s bedside.
“I’ve been trying to get someone to identify the stitching on the hem of this thing,” he said in a disgusted tone, waving the bloodstained shift.
“Here. Let me see it.”
Silk wordlessly handed her the garment, She glanced at it almost casually. “Northeastern Drasnia,” she told him, “from somewhere near the town of Rheon.”
“Are you sure?” Silk came to his feet quickly.
She nodded. “That kind of stitching was developed centuries ago -back in the days when all the garments up there were made from reindeer skin.”
“That’s disgusting,” Silk said.
“What is?”
“I ran around with this thing all day long -up and down all those stairs and in and out of every tailor shop in Riva -and all I had to do to find out what I wanted to know was show it to you.”
“That’s not my fault, Prince Kheldar,” she told him, handing back the shift. “If you don’t know enough to bring these little problems to me by now, then there probably isn’t much hope for you.”
“Thanks, Polgara,” he said drily.
“Then the assassin was a Drasnian,” Garion said.
“Anortheastern Drasnian,” Silk corrected. “Those people up there are a strange sort -almost worse than the ones who live in the fens.”
“Strange?”
“Standoffish, closemouthed, unfriendly, clannish, secretive. Everybody in northeast Drasnia behaves as if he had all the state secrets in the kingdom tucked up his sleeve.”
“Why would they hate Ce’Nedra so much?” Garion asked with a puzzled frown.
“I wouldn’t make too much of the fact that this assassin was a Drasnian, Garion,” Silk told him. “People who hire other people to do their killing for them don’t always go looking for their hirelings close to home -and, although there are a lot of assassins in the world, very few of them are women.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Ido think that I’ll take a trip up to Rheon and have a look around, however.”