‘All right, uncle,’ Polgara agreed.
‘One other thing, Pol,’ he added, ‘and I’m not trying to be offensive.’
‘That’s a novelty.’
‘You’re in good form this morning,’ he grinned. ‘Anyway, a mountain like that one breeds its own weather – and most particularly, its own winds.’
‘Yes, Uncle, I know.’
‘I know how fond you are of snowy owls, but the feathers are too soft. If you get into a high wind, you could end up coming back naked.’
She gave him a long, level look.
‘Do you want all your feathers blown off?’
‘No, Uncle, as a matter of fact, I don’t.’
‘Why don’t you do it my way then? You might even find that you like being a hawk.’
‘Blue banded, I suppose?’
‘Well, that’s up to you, but you do look good in blue, Pol.’
‘You’re impossible.’ She laughed. ‘All right, uncle, we’ll do it your way.’
‘I’ll change first,’ he offered. ‘Then you can use me as a model to make sure you get the shape right.’
‘I know what a hawk looks like, Uncle.’
‘Of course you do, Pol. I’m just trying to be helpful.’
‘You’re too kind.’
It felt very strange to take a shape other than that of a wolf. Garion looked himself over carefully, making frequent comparisons to Beldin, who perched fierce-eyed and magnificent on a branch overhead.
‘Good enough,’ Beldin told him, ‘but next time make your tail feathers a little fuller. You need them to steer with.’
‘All right, gentlemen,’ Polgara said from a near-by limb, ‘let’s get started.’
‘I’ll lead,’ Beldin said. ‘I’ve had more practice at this. If we hit a downdraft, sheer away from the mountain. You don’t want to get banged up against those rocks.’ He spread his wings, flapped a few times, and flew off.
The only time Garion had been aloft before had been on the long flight from Jarviksholm to Riva after Geran had been abducted. He had flown that time as a speckled falcon. The blue-banded hawk was a much bigger bird, and flying over mountain terrain was much different from flying over the vast open expanse of the Sea of the Winds. The air currents eddied and swirled around the rocks, making them unpredictable and even dangerous.
The three hawks spiraled upward on a rising column of air. It was an effortless way to fly, and Garion began to understand Beldin’s intense joy in flight.
He also discovered that his eyes were incredibly sharp. Every detail on the mountainside stood out as if it were directly in front of him. He could see insects and the individual petals of wildflowers. His talons twitched involuntarily when a small mountain rodent scurried across a rockfall.
‘Pay attention to what we’re here for, Garion,’ he heard Aunt Pol’s voice in the silences of his mind.
‘But—’ The yearning to plummet down with his talons spread wide was almost irresistible.
‘No buts, Garion. You’ve already had breakfast. Just leave the poor little creature alone.’
‘You’re taking all the fun out of it for him, Pol,’ Garion heard Beldin protest.
‘We’re not here to have fun, uncle. Lead on.’
The buffeting was sudden, and it took Garion by surprise. A violent downdraft hurled him toward a rocky slope, and it was only at the last instant that he was able to veer away from certain disaster. The downdraft pushed him this way and that, wrenching at his wings, and it was suddenly accompanied by a pelting rainstorm, huge, icy drops that pounded at him like large wet hammers.
‘It isn’t natural, Garion!’ Aunt Pol’s voice came to him sharply. He looked around desperately, but he could not see her.
‘Where are you?’ he called out.
‘Never mind that! Use the Orb! The Dals are trying to keep us away!’
Garion was not entirely positive that the Orb could hear him in that strange place to which it went when he changed form, but he had no choice but to try. The driving rain and howling wind currents made settling to earth and resuming his own shape unthinkable. ‘Make it stop!’ he called out to the stone, ‘– the wind, the rain, all of it!’
The surge he felt when the Orb unleashed its power sent him staggering through the air, flapping his wings desperately to hold his balance. The air around him seemed suddenly bright blue.
And then the turbulence and the rain which had accompanied it was gone, and the column of warm air was back, rising undisturbed into the summer air.
He had lost at least a thousand feet in the downdraft, and he saw Aunt Pol and Beldin, each over a mile away in opposite directions. As he began again to spiral upward, he saw that they also were rising and veering through the air toward him. ‘Stay on your guard,’ Aunt Pol’s voice told him. ‘Use the Orb to muffle anything else they try to throw at us.’
It took them only a few minutes to regain the height they had lost, and they continued upward over forests and rockslides until they reached that region on the flanks of the mountain above the tree-line and below the eternal snows. It was an area of steep meadows with grass and wildflowers nodding in the mountain breeze.
‘There!’ Beldin’s voice seemed to crackle. ‘It’s a trail.’
‘Are you sure it’s not just a game trail, uncle?’ Polgara asked him.
‘It’s too straight, Pol. A deer couldn’t walk in a straight line if his life depended on it. That trail is man-made. Let’s see where it goes.’ He tilted on one wing and swooped down toward the well-traveled track stretching up one of the meadows toward a gap in a rocky ridge. At the upper end of the meadow, he flared his wings. ‘Let’s go down,’ he told them. ‘It might be better if we follow the rest of the way on foot.’
Aunt Pol and Garion followed him down, and the three of them blurred back into their own forms. ‘It was touch and go there for a while,’ Beldin said. ‘I came within a few feet of bending my beak on a rockslide.’ He looked critically at Polgara. ‘Would you like to revise your theory about the Dals not hurting anybody?’
‘We’ll see.’
‘I wish I had my sword,’ Garion said. ‘If we run into trouble, we’re pretty much defenseless.’
‘I don’t know if your sword would be much use against the kind of trouble we’re likely to come up against,’ Beldin told him. ‘Don’t lose contact with the Orb, though. Let’s see where this goes.’ He started up the steep trail toward the ridge.