All of Wacune went into deep mourning, but after about a week
I put aside my own grief and went to the palace to speak with
Alleran. His eyes were puffy from weeping as he stood at the table
in his father’s study staring at those fatal drawings. ‘It should have
worked, Aunt Pol!’ he said in an anguished voice. ‘What went
wrong? Everything was put together exactly according to these
plans.’
‘It was the plans that were at the heart of the problem, your
Grace,’ I told him.
‘Your Grace?’
‘You’re the Duke of Wacune now, my Lord, so you’d better pull
yourself together. Even in time of grief, events move on. With your
permission, I’ll make the necessary arrangements for your
coronation. Pull yourself together, Alleran. Wacune needs you now.’
‘I’m not ready for this, Aunt Pol,’ he protested.
‘It’s either you or your son, Alleran, and he’s a lot less ready than
you are. That festering sore called Asturia is on your western border,
and Nerasin will jump on any perceived weakness. It’s your duty,
your Grace. Don’t let us down.’
‘If I could just figure out why this cursed thing flew all apart
the way it did!’ he burst out, slamming his fist down on the
drawings. ‘I’ve gone over all the arithmetic myself. It should have
worked.’
‘It did, Alleran. It did exactly what that design called for it to do.
The only problem with the arithmetic was that the computations
concerning the strength of the structural beams were left out. The
catapult didn’t work because it was too powerful. The frame should
have been made of steel instead of wooden beams. The pressures
were too great to be contained by a wooden frame. That’s why it
tore itself apart.’
‘That much steel would have been very expensive, Aunt Pol.’
‘I think the wood was even more expensive, your Grace. Fold
those drawings up and put them away. We have a great deal to
do.’
Alleran’s coronation was subdued, but Corrolin traveled up from
VO Mimbre to attend, so that put a bit of iron in the back of the
new Duke of Wacune. I sat in on their private discussions, but it
Probably wasn’t really necessary. Kathandrion had been wise
enough not to raise his heir in a political vacuum, and the Mimbrate
emmissary to the court at Vo Wacune had given Alleran instruction
in the somewhat overly-involved courtesies of the Mimbrates. Their
first meetings were a bit stiff, but as they came to know each other
.better, they started to relax. Their major concern was still Asturia
and that naturally drew them closer together.
It was in the autumn of that same year that Nerasin did something
that pushed me very close to the line my father had repeatedly
warned me not to cross.
, Asrana and Mandorin were riding down to Vo Mimbre for what
was probably only a social visit, and when they reached that band
of trees that lines the River Arend and started upstream toward Vo
Mimbre, a number of Asturian archers, who’d somehow managed
to sneak down across the plains of Mimbre to the southern border,
quite literally riddled my two dear friends with arrows. Nerasin
had obviously discovered that Asrana’d been behind all the troubles
he’d been having in Vo Astur, and so he’d taken some fairly typical
Arendish steps.
When I heard about the deaths of my friends, I was very nearly
overcome with grief. I wept for days and then-steeled myself for
revenge. I was quite certain that I could devise some things to do to
Nerasin that would make strong men shudder in horror for several
thousand years. Killane and his family wisely stayed clear of me
when I came storming out of my room. My first stop was the kitchen.
I was going to need some sharp implements to carry out my plans
for Nerasin. My training as a cook gave me some interesting terms
to work with. ‘Filleting’ had a nice sound to it, I thought, and so
did ‘de-boning’. The idea of cutting out Nerasin’s bones one by one
very slowly had an enormous appeal for some reason. My eyes
brightened when I came across a cheese-grater.
‘All right, Polgara, put the tools back where you got them. You’re not
going anywhere.’ It was mother’s voice.
‘He murdered my friends, mother!’ I burst out. ‘I’m not going to let
him get away with that!’
‘I see that you’re becoming very adept at following local customs,’ she
noted, and there was a faint touch of rebuke in her voice.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Why did the Master send you to Arendia?’
‘TO put a stop to all their foolishness.’
‘Oh, now I understand. You’re going to wallow in that same foolishness
so that you can see what it’s like. Interesting idea. Did you take the same
approach in your study of medicine? Did you catch a disease so that you’d
understand it better before you tried to cure it?’
‘That’s absurd.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you, Polgara.
this brooding about knives and meat-hooks and cheese-graters is exactly
what You were sent to Arendia to put a stop to. Nerasin murdered your
friends, so now you’re going to murder him. Then one of his relatives will
murder you. Then your father will murder somebody else in Nerasin’s
family. Then somebody will murder your father. Then Beldin will murder
somebody else. And it will go on and on and on until nobody’s even able
to remember who Asrana and Mandorin were. That’s what blood feuds
are all about, Pol. Congratulations. You’re an Arend to your fingertips,
now.
‘But I loved them, mother!’
‘It’s a noble emotion, but wading in blood isn’t the best way to express
it.
That’s when I started to weep again.
‘I’m glad we had a chance to have this little chat, Pol,’ she said
pleasantly. ‘Oh, incidentally, you’re going to need Nerasin a little later, so
killing him and chopping him up for stew-meat wouldn’t really be
appropriate. Be well, Polgara.’ And then she was gone.
I sighed and put all the kitchen implements back where I’d found
them.
The funeral of Asrana and Mandorin was held at Vo Mandor in
the autumn of 2327, and Alleran and I, quite naturally, attended.
The Arendish religion isn’t good at funerals. Chaldan’s a warrior
God, and his priests are far more interested in vengeance than in
comforting survivors. Perhaps I’m being a little picky, but it seems
to me that a funeral sermon based on the theme, ‘I’ll get even with
you for that, you dirty rascal’ lacks a dignified, elegiac tone.
The blood-thirsty ranting of the priest of Chaldan who conducted
the funeral seemed to move Alleran and Corrolin, though, because
after the funeral and the entombment of Mandorin and Asrana, they
got down to some serious plotting about appropriate responses to
Nerasin’s atrocious behavior. I chose to forego participation in this
little exercise of pure Arendishness. I’d put my own Arendish
ImPulses away along with the cheese-grater.
I wandered instead about the grim, gloomy halls of Mandorin’s
fortress, and I ultimately ended up in Asrana’s dressing-room,
where her fragrance still faintly lingered. Asrana had never really
been what you’d call tidy, and she’d left things scattered all over
her dressing table. Without even thinking, I started to straighten
up, setting jars and bottles in a neat row along the bottom of her
mirror, brushing away the faint dusting of face powder, and placing
her combs and brushes at an aesthetically pleasing angle. I was in
the act of setting down her favorite ivory comb when I changed my
mind. I kept it instead, and I’ve carried it with me for all these years.
it lies right now on my own dressing table, not fifteen feet from
where I sit at this very moment.
Of course, I was not the only one who’d been totally incensed by
the murders. As I mentioned, both Corrolin and Alleran took them
very personally, and the simple blockade of the borders of Asturia
tightened, becoming almost like a noose, and large raiding parties
swept out of both Mimbre and Wacune, savaging Asturia with a
kind of studied brutality.
Despite my best efforts, the Arendish civil wars had taken up
almost exactly where they’d left off when I’d first gone there. The
thing they called ‘Polgara’s Peace’ had fallen apart.
The situation in Asturia was growing more desperate as the
months dragged by. Corrolin’s Mimbrate knights rode almost at
will through the agricultural south and west of the Asturian duchy,
and Wacite archers, who were at least as proficient as their Asturian
counterparts, quite literally killed everything that moved along
Asturia’s eastern frontier. At first this random violence seemed
senseless, but when I berated Alleran for renewing the war, he gave
me that innocent look that Arends are so good at and said, ‘We
aren’t making war on the Asturians, Aunt Pol. We’re making war