Enchanters' End Game

Adara's face was flaming with a look of almost unbearable shame. She twisted this way and that in her saddle, trying to avoid Hettar's stern, unforgiving stare. No sooner had her horse been watered than she jerked her reins and dug her heels into his flanks. Her startled mount scrambled his hoofs in the gravel and leaped away, running back the way they had come across the rock-littered valley floor.

Hettar swore and drove his mount after her.

"Whatever is she doing?" Ce'Nedra exclaimed.

"Lord Hettar's rebuke hath stung our gentle companion beyond her endurance," Ariana observed. "His good opinion is dearer to her than leer life itself."

"Hettar?" Ce'Nedra was stunned.

"Hath not throe eye informed thee how it doth stand with our dear friend?" Ariana asked in mild surprise. "Thou art strangely unobservant, Princess."

"Hettar?" Ce'Nedra repeated. "I had no idea."

"Mayhap it is because I am Mimbrate," Ariana concluded. "The ladies of my people are most sensitive to the signs of gentle affection in others."

It took perhaps a hundred yards for Hettar to overtake Adara's plunging horse. He seized her reins in one fist and jerked her roughly to a stop, speaking sharply to her, demanding to know what she was doing. Adara twisted this way and that in her saddle, trying to keep him from seeing her face as he continued to chide her.

Then a flicker of movement no more than twenty feet from the two of them caught Ce'Nedra's eye. Astonishingly, a mail-shined Murgo rose up out of the sand between two scrubby bushes, shaking off the sheet of brown-splotched canvas beneath which he had lain concealed. As he rose, his short bow was already drawn.

"Hettar!" Ce'Nedra screamed as the Murgo raised his bow. Hettar's back was to the Murgo, but Adara saw the man aiming his arrow at the Algar's unprotected back. With a desperate move, she ripped her reins from Hettar's grip and drove her horse into his. His mount lurched back, stumbled and fell, throwing the unprepared man to the ground even as Adara, flailing her horse's flanks with the ends of her reins, plunged directly at the Murgo.

With only the faintest flicker of annoyance, the Murgo released his arrow at the charging girl.

Even at that distance, Ce'Nedra could hear the distinct sound the arrow made when it struck Adara. It was a sound she would remember with horror for the remainder of her life. Adara doubled sharply, her free hand clutching at the arrow buried low in her chest, but her plunging gallop did not falter nor change as she rode the Murgo down. He tumbled and rolled beneath the churning hoofs of her horse, then lurched again to his feet as soon as she had passed over him, his hand jerking at his sheathed sword. But Hettar was already upon him, sabre flashing in the glaring sunlight. The Murgo screamed once as he fell.

Hettar, his dripping sabre still in his hand, turned angrily to Adara. "What a stupid thing," he roared at her, but his shout cut off suddenly. Her horse had come to a stop a few yards beyond the Murgo, and she drooped in her saddle, her dark hair falling like a veil across her pale face and both of her hands pressed to her chest. Then, slowly, she toppled from her saddle.

With a strangled cry, Hettar dropped his sabre and ran to her.

"Adara!" the princess wailed, her hands going to her face in horror even as Hettar gently turned the stricken girl over. The arrow, still standing out of her lower chest, throbbed with the rhythm of her faltering heartbeat.

When the rest of them reached the pair, Hettar was holding Adara in his arms, staring into her pale face with a stricken look. "You little fool," he was murmuring in a broken voice. "You little fool."

Ariana slid from her saddle even before her horse stopped moving and ran to Hettar's side. "Do not move her, my Lord," she told him sharply. "The arrow hath pierced her lung, and shouldst thou move her, its keen edge will gash out her life."

"Take it out," Hettar said from between clenched teeth.

"Nay, my Lord. To pull the arrow now will do more damage than to leave it."

"I can't bear to see it sticking out of her like that," he almost sobbed.

"Then don't look, my Lord," Ariana said bluntly, kneeling beside Adara and placing a cool, professional hand on the wounded girl's throat.

"She's not dead, is she?" Hettar almost begged.

Ariana shook her head. "Gravely wounded, but her life doth still pulse within her. Instruct thy men to improvise a litter at once, my Lord. We must convey our dear friend to the fortress and Lady Polgara's ministrations immediately, lest her life drain away."

"Can't you do something?" he croaked.

"Not here in this sun-blasted desolation, my Lord. I have neither instruments nor medications, and the wound may be past my skill. The Lady Polgara is her only hope. The litter, my Lord. Quickly!"

Polgara's face was somber, and her eyes as hard as flint when she emerged from Adara's sickroom late that afternoon.

"How is she?" Hettar demanded. He had been pacing up and down in the main corridor of the blockhouse for hours, stopping every so often to strike savagely at the crudely built stone walls with his impotent fists.

"Somewhat improved," Polgara replied. "The crisis is past, but she's still terribly weak. She's asking for you."

"She will recover, won't she?" Hettar's question had a note of fear in it.

"Probably - if there aren't any complications. She's young, and the wound looked more serious than it actually was. I gave her something that will make her very talkative, but don't stay too long. She needs rest." Polgara's eyes moved to Ce'Nedra's tear-streaked face. "Come to my room after you've seen her, your Majesty," she said firmly. "You and I have something to discuss."

Adara's porcelain face was framed by the tumbled mass of her dark brown hair spreading across the pillow. She was very pale, but, though her eyes had a slightly unfocused look about them, they were very bright. Ariana sat quietly at the bedside.

"How do you feel, Adara?" Ce'Nedra asked in the quiet but cheerful voice one always assumes with the sick.

Adara gave her a wan little smile.

"Are you in any pain?"

"No," Adara's voice had a little dying fall to it. "No pain, but I feel very light-headed and strange."

"Why did you do that, Adara?" Hettar asked very directly. "You didn't have to ride right at the Murgo like that."

"You spend too much time with horses, my Lord Sha-dar," Adara told him with a faint smile. "You've forgotten how to understand the feelings of your own kind."