“We’ll wait a while,” Silk said. “If Brill and his hireling are following, they shouldn’t be far behind.”
He sat on a stump and watched the empty valley.
After a while, a cart moved slowly along the road toward Winold. It looked tiny in the distance, and its pace along the scar of the road seemed very slow.
The sun rose a bit higher, and they squinted into its full morning brightness.
“Silk,” Garion said finally in a hesitant tone.
“Yes, Garion?”
“What’s this all about?” It was a bold question to ask, but Garion felt he knew Silk well enough now to ask it.
“All what?”
“What we’re doing. I’ve heard a few things and guessed a few more, but it doesn’t really make any sense to me.”
“And just what have you guessed, Garion?” Silk asked, his small eyes very bright in his unshaven face.
“Something’s been stolen-something very important – and Mister Wolf and Aunt Pol – and the rest of us – are trying to get it back.”
“All right,” Silk said. “That much is true.”
“Mister Wolf and Aunt Pol are not at all what they seem to be,” Garion went on.
“No,” Silk agreed, “they aren’t.”
“I think they can do things that other people can’t do,” Garion said, struggling with the words. “Mister Wolf can follow this thing – whatever it is – without seeing it. And last week in those woods when the Murgos passed, they did something – I don’t even know how to describe it, but it was almost as if they reached out and put my mind to sleep. How did they do that? And why?”
Silk chuckled.
“You’re a very observant lad,” he said. Then his tone became more serious. “We’re living in momentous times, Garion. The events of a thousand years and more have all focused on these very days. The world, I’m told, is like that. Centuries pass when nothing happens, and then in a few short years events of such tremendous importance take place that the world is never the same again.”
“I think that if I had my choice, I’d prefer one of those quiet centuries,” Garion said glumly.
“Oh, no,” Silk said, his lips drawing back in a ferretlike grin. “Now’s the time to be alive – to see it all happen, to be a part of it. That makes the blood race, and each breath is an adventure.”
Garion let that pass.
“What is this thing we’re following?” he asked.
“It’s best if you don’t even know its name,” Silk told him seriously, “or the name of the one who stole it. There are people trying to stop us; and what you don’t know, you can’t reveal.”
“I’m not in the habit of talking to Murgos,” Garion said stiffly.
“It’s not necessary to talk to them,” Silk said. “There are some among them who can reach out and pick the thoughts right out of your mind.”
“That isn’t possible,” Garion said.
“Who’s to say what’s possible and what isn’t?” Silk asked. And Garion remembered a conversation he had once had with Mister Wolf about the possible and the impossible.
Silk sat on the stump in the newly risen sun looking thoughtfully down into the still-shadowy valley, an ordinary-looking little man in ordinary-looking tunic and hose and a rough brown shoulder cape with its hood turned up over his head.
“You were raised as a Sendar, Garion,” he said, “and Sendars are solid, practical men with little patience for such things as sorcery and magic and other things that can’t be seen or touched. Your friend, Durnik, is a perfect Sendar. He can mend a shoe or fix a broken wheel or dose a sick horse, but I doubt that he could bring himself to believe in the tiniest bit of magic.”
“I am a Sendar,” Garion objected. The hint implicit in Silk’s observation struck at the very center of his sense of his own identity.
Silk turned and looked at him closely.
“No,” he said, “you aren’t. I know a Sendar when I see one just as I can recognize the difference between an Arend and a Tolnedran or a Cherek and an Algar. There’s a certain set of the head, a certain look about the eyes of Sendars that you don’t have. You’re not a Sendar.”
“What am I then?” Garion challenged.
“I don’t know,” Silk said with a puzzled frown, “and that’s very unusual, since I’ve been trained to know what people are. It may come to me in time, though.”
“Is Aunt Pol a Sendar?” Garion asked.
“Of course not.” Silk laughed.
“That explains it then,” Garion said. “I’m probably the same thing she is.”
Silk looked sharply at him.
“She’s my father’s sister, after all,” Garion said. “At first I thought it was my mother she was related to, but that was wrong. It was my father; I know that now.”
“That’s impossible,” Silk said flatly.
“Impossible?”
“Absolutely out of the question. The whole notion’s unthinkable.”
“Why?”
Silk chewed at his lower lip for a moment. “Let’s go back to the wagons,” he said shortly.
They turned and went down through the dark trees with the bright morning sunlight slanting on their backs in the frosty air.
They rode the back lanes for the rest of the day. Late in the afternoon when the sun had begun to drop into a purple bank of clouds toward the west, they arrived at the farm where they were to pick up Mingan’s hams. Silk spoke with the stout farmer and showed him the piece of parchment Mingan had given them in Darine.
“I’ll be glad to get rid of them,” the farmer said. “They’ve been occupying storage space I sorely need.”
“That’s frequently the case when one has dealings with Tolnedrans,” Silk observed. “They’re gifted at getting a bit more than they pay foreven if it’s only the free use of someone else’s storage sheds.”
The farmer glumly agreed.
“I wonder,” Silk said as if the thought had just occurred to him, “I wonder if you might have seen a friend of mine – Brill by name? A medium-sized man with black hair and beard and a cast to one eye?”
“Patched clothes and a sour disposition?” the stout farmer asked.
“That’s him,” Silk said.
“He’s been about the area,” the farmer said, “looking – or so he said – for an old man and a woman and a boy. He said that they stole some things from his master and that he’d been sent to find them.”
“How long ago was that?” Silk asked.
“A week or so,” the farmer said.
“I’m sorry to have missed him,” Silk said. “I wish I had the leisure to look him up.”
“I can’t for my life think why,” the farmer said bluntly. “To be honest with you, I didn’t care much for your friend.”
“I’m not overfond of him myself,” Silk agreed, “but the truth is that he owes me some money. I could quite easily do without Brill’s companionship, but I’m lonesome for the money, if you take my meaning.”
The farmer laughed.
“I’d take it as a kindness if you happened to forget that I asked after him,” Silk said. “He’ll likely be hard enough to find even if he isn’t warned that I’m looking for him.”
“You can depend on my discretion,” the stout man said, still laughing. “I have a loft where you and your wagoneers can put up for the night, and I’d take it kindly if you’d sup with my workers in the dining hall over there.”
“My thanks,” Silk said, bowing slightly. “The ground’s cold, and it’s been some time since we’ve eaten anything but the rough fare of the road.”
“You wagoneers lead adventuresome lives,” the stout man said almost enviously. “Free as birds with always a new horizon just beyond the next hilltop.”
“It’s much overrated,” Silk told him, “and winter’s a thin time for birds and wagoneers both.”
The farmer laughed again, clapped Silk on the shoulder and then showed him where to put up the horses.
The food in the stout farmer’s dining hall was plain, but there was plenty; and the loft was a bit drafty, but the hay was soft. Garion slept soundly. The farm was not Faldor’s, but it was familiar enough, and there was that comforting sense of having walls about him again that made him feel secure.
The following morning, after a solid breakfast, they loaded the wagons with the Tolnedran’s salt-crusted hams and bade the farmer a friendly good-bye.
The clouds that had begun to bank up in the west the evening before had covered the sky during the night, and it was cold and gray as they set out for Muros, fifty leagues to the south.
Chapter Nine
THE ALMOST TWO WEEKS it took them to reach Muros were the most uncomfortable Garion had ever spent. Their route skirted the edge of the foothills through rolling and sparsely settled country, and the sky hung gray and cold overhead. There were occasional spits of snow, and the mountains loomed black against the skyline to the east.