Castle of Wizardry

a very brave child. Everyone thought that he had drowned and that his body had been washed out to sea. Your grandfather and I encouraged that belief. For thirteen hundred years we've hidden Prince Gared's descendants. For generations they've lived out their lives in quiet obscurity for the single purpose of bringing you to the throne - and now you say that you don't want to be king?"
    "I don't know any of those people," he said sullenly. He knew he was behaving badly, but he couldn't seem to help himself.
    "Would it help if you did know them - some of them, anyway?"
    The question baffled him.
    "Perhaps it might," she decided. She laid her sewing aside and stood up, drawing him to his feet. "Come with me," she told him and led him to the tall window that looked out over the city below. There was a small balcony outside; in one corner where a rain-gutter had cracked, there had built up during the fall and winter a sheet of shiny black ice, curving down over the railing and spreading out on the balcony floor.
    Aunt Pol unlatched the window and it swung open, admitting a blast of icy air that made the candles dance. "Look directly into the ice, Garion," she told him, pointing at the glittering blackness. "Look deep into it."
    He did as she told him and felt the force of her mind at work. Something was in the ice - shapeless at first but emerging slowly and becoming more and more visible. It was, he saw finally, the figure of a pale blond woman, quite lovely and with a warm smile on her lips. She seemed young, and her eyes were directly on Garion's face. "My baby," a voice seemed to whisper to him. "My little Garion."
    Garion began to tremble violently. "Mother?" he gasped.
    "So tall now," the whisper continued. "Almost a man."
    "And already a king, Ildera," Aunt Pol told the phantom in a gentle voice.
    "Then he was the chosen one," the ghost of Garion's mother exulted. "I knew it. I could feel it when I carried him under my heart."
    A second shape had begun to appear beside the first. It was a tall young man with dark hair but a strangely familiar face. Garion clearly saw its resemblance to his own. "Hail Belgarion, my son," the second shape said to him.
    "Father," Garion replied, not knowing what else to say.
    "Our blessings, Garion," the second ghost said as the two figures started to fade.
    "I avenged you, father," Garion called after them. It seemed important that they know that. He was never sure, however, if they had heard him.
    Aunt Pol was leaning against the window frame with a look of exhaustion on her face.
    "Are you all right?" Garion asked her, concerned.
    "It's a very difficult thing to do, dear," she told him, passing a weary hand over her face.
    But there was yet another flicker within the depths of the ice, and the familiar shape of the blue wolf appeared-the one who had joined Belgarath in the fight with Grul the Eldrak in the mountains of Ulgo. The wolf sat looking at them for a moment, then flickered briefly into the shape of a snowy owl and finally became a tawny-haired woman with golden eyes. Her face was so like Aunt Pol's that Garion could not help glancing quickly back and forth to compare them.
    "You left it open, Polgara," the golden-eyed woman said gently. Her voice was as warm and soft as a summer evening.
    "Yes, mother," Aunt Pol replied. "I'll close it in a moment."
    "It's all right, Polgara," the wolf woman told her daughter. "It gave me the chance to meet him." She looked directly into Garion's face. "A touch or two is still there," she observed. "A bit about the eyes and in the shape of the jaw. Does he know?"
    "Not everything, mother," Aunt Pol answered.
    "Perhaps it's as well," Poledra noted.
    Once again another figure emerged out of the dark depths of the ice. The second woman had hair like sunlight, and her face was even more like Aunt Pol's than Poledra's. "Polgara, my dear sister," she said.
    "Beldaran," Aunt Pol responded in a voice overwhelmed with love.
    "And Belgarion," Garion's ultimate grandmother said, "the final flower of my love and Riva's."
    "Our blessings also, Belgarion," Poledra declared. "Farewell for now, but know that we love thee." And then the two were gone.
    "Does that help?" Aunt Pol asked him, her voice deep with emotion and her eyes filled with tears.
    Garion was too stunned by what he had just seen and heard to answer. Dumbly he nodded.
    "I'm glad the effort wasn't wasted then," she said. "Please close the window, dear. It's letting the winter in."

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