Ce’Nedra heard a strangled gasp directly behind her. King Anheg, the blood drained from his face, looked once through the door, then turned and ran.
“Lady Polgara,” Ce’Nedra remonstrated to the sorceress, trying not so much to reason with her as to minimize the destruction.
Polgara shattered four priceless vases standing on the mantelpiece with four precisely separate explosions. Outside the window, the bright spring morning vanished as if the sun had suddenly been extinguished, and there was a sullen rumble of thunder that Ce’Nedra prayed devoutly was natural.
“Whatever is the matter?” the princess asked, hoping to draw the enraged sorceress into explanation rather than more curses. It was the curses that had to be headed off. Polgara seemed to have a deep-seated need to emphasize her oaths with explosions.
Polgara, however, did not reply. Instead she merely threw the parchment at Ce’Nedra, turned, and blew a marble statue into fine white gravel. Wild-eyed, she wheeled about, looking for something else to break, but there was very little left in the smoking room that she had not already reduced to rubble.
“No!” Ce’Nedra cried out sharply as the raging woman’s eyes fell on the exquisite crystal wren Garion had given her. The princess knew that Polgara valued the glass bird more than anything else she possessed, and she leaped forward to protect the delicate piece.
“Get it,” Polgara snarled at her from between clenched teeth. “Take it out of my sight.” Her eyes burned with a terrible need to destroy something else. She spun and hurled the incandescent ball of fire she had wielded out through the shattered window. The explosion, when it burst in the suddenly murky air outside, was ghastly. With her fists clenched tightly at her sides, she raised her distorted face and began to curse again. From roiling black clouds that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, shattering bolts of lightning began to rain down on the island. No longer satisfied with localized destruction, Polgara expanded her rage to rake the Isle and the Sea of the Winds with sizzling fire and ear-splitting thunder. Then, with a dreadful intensity, she raised one fist and suddenly opened it. The downpour of rain she called was beyond belief. Her glittering eyes narrowed, and she raised her other fist. The rain instantly turned to hail-great, jagged chunks of ice that crashed and splintered against the rocks to fill the air with flying fragments and thick steam.
Ce’Nedra caught up the wren, stooped to grab the rumpled piece of parchment from the floor, and then she fled.
King Anheg poked his frightened face from around a corner. “Can’t you stop her?” he demanded in a shaking voice.
“Nothing can stop her, your Majesty.”
“Anheg! Get in here!” Polgara’s voice rang above the thunder and the crashing deluge of hail that shook the Citadel.
“Oh, Belar,” King Anheg muttered devoutly, casting his eyes skyward even as he hurried toward Polgara’s door.
“Get word to Val Alorn immediately!” she commanded him. “My father, Silk, and Garion slipped out of the Citadel last night. Get your fleet out and bring them back! I don’t care if you have to take the world apart stone by stone. Find them and bring them back!”
“Polgara, I-” The King of Cherek faltered.
“Don’t stand there gaping like an idiot! Move!”
Carefully, almost with a studied calm, the Princess Ce’Nedra handed the glass wren to her frightened maid. “Put this someplace safe,” she said. Then she turned and went back to the center of the storm. “What was that you just said?” she asked Polgara in a level voice.
“My idiot father, Garion, and that disgusting thief decided last night to go off on their own,” Polgara replied in an icy voice made even more terrible by the superhuman control that held it in.
“They did what?” Ce’Nedra asked flatly.
“They left. They sneaked away during the night.”
“Then you must go after them.”
“I can’t, Ce’Nedra.” Polgara spoke as if explaining something to a child. “Someone has to stay here. There are too many things here that could go wrong. He knows that. He did it deliberately. He’s trapped me here.”
“Garion?”
“No, you silly girl! My father!” And Polgara began cursing again, each oath punctuated with a crash of thunder.
Ce’Nedra, however, scarcely heard her. She looked around. There was really nothing left to break in here. “You’ll excuse me, I hope,” she said. Then she turned, went back to her own rooms, and began breaking everything she could lay her hands on, screeching all the while like a Camaar fishwife.
Their separate rages lasted for several hours, and they rather carefully avoided each other during this period. Some emotions needed to be shared, but insane fury was not one of those. Eventually, Ce’Nedra felt she had exhausted the possibilities of her extended outburst, and she settled into the icy calm of one who has been mortally insulted. No matter what face his illiterate note put on the matter, it would be at the very most a week before the entire world knew that Garion had jilted her. The flight of her reluctant bridegroom would become a universal joke. It was absolutely intolerable!
She would meet the world, however, with a lifted chin and an imperious gaze. However she might weep and storm and rage in private, the face she presented to the world would betray no hint of how deeply she had been injured. All that was left for her was her pride, and she would never abandon that.
The Lady Polgara, however, seemed to feel no need for such imperial reserve. Once her initial fury had subsided to the degree that she allowed her private thunderstorm to pass, a few hardy souls assumed that the worst of it was over. The Earl of Trellheim went to her in an attempt to mollify her. He left her apartment moments later at a run with her crackling vituperation sizzling in the air about his ears. Barak was pale and shaken when he reported back to the others. “Don’t go near her,” he advised in a frightened voice. “Do whatever she says as quickly as you can, and stay absolutely out of her sight.”
“Isn’t she calming down at all?” King Rhodar asked.
“She’s finished breaking the furniture,” Barak replied. “I think she’s getting ready to start on people.”
Thereafter, each time Polgara emerged from her apartment, the warning spread instantly, and the halls of Iron-grip’s Citadel emptied. Her commands, delivered usually by her maid, were all variations of the initial orders she had given King Anheg. They were to find the vagrant trio and bring them back to face her.
In the days that followed, Princess Ce’Nedra’s first rage settled into a sort of peevishness that made people avoid her almost as much as they avoided Polgara – all but gentle Adara, who endured the tiny girl’s outbursts with a calm patience. The two of them spent most of their time sitting in the garden adjoining the royal apartments where Ce’Nedra could give vent to her emotions without fear of being overheard.
It was five days after Garion and the others had left before Ce’Nedra discovered the full implications of their departure.
The day was warm – the spring came eventually even to a bleak place like Riva – and the small bit of lawn in the center of the garden was a lush green. Pink, blue, and flaming red flowers nodded in their beds as bright yellow bees industriously carried kisses from blossom to blossom. Ce’Nedra, however, did not want to think about kisses. Dressed in her favorite pale green Dryad tunic, she bit rather savagely at an unoffending lock of hair and spoke to the patient Adara at length about the inconstancy of men.
It was about midafternoon when Queen Layla of Sendaria found them there. “Oh, there you are,” the plump little queen bubbled at them. As always, her crown was a little awry. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Why?” was Ce’Nedra’s somewhat ungracious reply.
Queen Layla stopped and looked critically at the princess. “My,” she said, “aren’t we cross today? Just what is your problem, Ce’Nedra? You’ve barely been civil for days now.”
Ce’Nedra caught Adara’s warning look to the queen, and that irritated her all the more. Her response was chilly. “I’m finding the experience of being jilted to be just a bit annoying, your Highness,” she said.
Queen Layla’s sunny face hardened. “Would you excuse us, Adara?” she asked.
“Of course, your Highness,” Adara replied, rising quickly. “I’ll be inside, Ce’Nedra,” she said and went gracefully out of the garden. Queen Layla waited until the girl was out of earshot, then sat down on a marble bench. “Come here, Ce’Nedra,” she said firmly.
The princess looked at the motherly little woman, a bit startled by the iron in her voice. Obediently she went to the bench and sat.
“You really should stop interpreting everything that happens in the world as a personal insult, you know,” Layla told her. “That’s a very unbecoming habit. What Garion, Belgarath, and Kheldar did has absolutely nothing to do with you.” She looked sternly at Ce’Nedra. “Do you know anything at all about the Prophecy?”