Guardians of the West
Page 64Brand 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 is always 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.
"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.
"A northeastern Drasnian," Silk corrected. "Those people up there are a strange sort -almost worse than the ones who live in the fens."
"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. "I do think that I'll take a trip up to Rheon and have a look around, however."
As the chill of winter set in, Polgara finally declared that Ce'Nedra was out of all danger. "I think I'll stay, though," she added. "Durnik and Errand can manage at home for a few months, and I'd probably no sooner get home than I'd have to turn around and come back."
Garion looked at her blankly.
"You didn't actually think that I was going to let anybody else deliver Ce'Nedra's first baby, did you?"
It snowed heavily just before Erastide, and the steep streets of the city of Riva became virtually impassable. Ce'Nedra's disposition soured noticeably. Her increasing girth made her awkward, and the depth of the snow in the city streets had rather effectively confined her to the Citadel.
Polgara took the little queen's outbursts and crying fits calmly, scarcely changing expression, even at the height of the eruptions. "You do want to have this baby, don't you?" she asked pointedly on one such occasion.
"Of course I do," Ce'Nedra replied indignantly.
"Well then, you have to go through this. It's the only way I know of to fill the nursery."
"Don't try to be reasonable with me, Lady Polgara," Ce'Nedra flared. "I'm not in the mood for reasonableness right now."
"A bit, yes."
"It's just that I feel so huge and ugly."
"That will pass, Ce'Nedra."
"Sometimes I wish I could just lay eggs -the way birds do."
"I'd stick to doing it the old way, dear. I don't think you have the disposition for sitting on a nest."
Erastide came and passed quietly. The celebration on the island was warm, but somewhat restrained. It seemed as if the whole population was holding its breath, waiting for a much larger reason for celebration. Winter ground on with each week adding more snow to the already high-piled drifts. A month or so after Erastide there was a brief thaw, lasting for perhaps two days, and then the frigid chill locked in again, turning the sodden snowbanks into blocks of ice. The weeks plodded by tediously, and everybody waited.
"Would you just look at that?" Ce'Nedra said angrily to Garion one morning shortly after they had arisen.
"At what, dear?" he replied mildly.