Guardians of the West

from Cthol Murgos was sketchy at best, but it appeared that things in the far south remained at an impasse, with Kal Zakath's Malloreans holding the plains and Urgit's Murgos firmly entrenched in the mountains.
    Periodic reports forwarded to Garion by Drasnian Intelligence seemed to indicate that the re-emergent Bear-cult was doing little more than milling around out in the countryside.
    Garion enjoyed this respite from crisis and, since there was no really pressing business, he took to sleeping late, sometimes lying in bed in a kind of luxurious doze until two or three hours past sunrise.
    On one such morning about midsummer, he was having an absolutely splendid dream. He and Ce'Nedra were leaping from the loft in the barn at Faldor's farm into the soft hay piled below. He was awakened rather rudely as his wife bolted from the bed and ran into an adjoining chamber where she was violently and noisily sick.
    "Ce'Nedra!" he exclaimed, jumping out of bed to follow her. "What are you doing?"
    "I'm throwing up," she replied, raising her pale face from the basin she was holding on her knees.
    "Are you sick?"
    "No," she drawled sarcastically. "I'm doing it for fun."
    "I'll get one of the physicians," he said, grabbing, up a robe.
    "Never mind."
    "But you're sick."
    "Of course I am, but I don't need a physician."
    "That doesn't make any sense, Ce'Nedra. If you're sick, you need a doctor."
    "I'm supposed to be sick," she told him.
    "What? "
    "Don't you know anything, Garion? I'll probably get sick every morning for the next several months."
    "I don't understand you at all, Ce'Nedra."
    "You're impossibly dense. People in my condition always get sick in the morning."
    "Condition? What condition?"
    She rolled her eyes upward almost in despair. "Garion," she said with exaggerated patience, "do you remember that little problem we had last fall? The problem that made us send for Lady Polgara?"
    "Well -yes."
    "I'm so glad. Well, we don't have that problem any more."
    He stared at her, slowly comprehending. "You mean- ?"
    "Yes, dear," she said with a pale smile. "You're going to be a father. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll throw up again."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    They did not match. Now matter how hard Garion twisted and turned the sense of the two passages, there was no apparent way to make them match. Despite the fact that they both seemed to describe the same period of time, they simply went off in opposite directions. It was a bright, golden autumn morning outside, but the dusty library seemed somehow dim, chill, and uninviting.
    Garion did not think of himself as a scholar and he had approached the task that Belgarath had laid upon him with some reluctance. The sheer volume of the documents he was obliged to read was intimidating, for one thing, and this gloomy little room with its smell of ancient parchment and mildewed leather bindings always depressed him. He had done unpleasant things before, however, and, although he was a bit grim about it, he nonetheless dutifully spent at least two hours a day confined in this prisonlike cell, struggling with ancient books and scrolls written in often-times difficult script. At least, he told himself, it was better than scrubbing pots in a scullery.
    He set his teeth together and laid the two scrolls side by side on the table to compare them again. He read slowly and aloud, hoping perhaps to catch with his ears what his eyes might miss. The Darine Codex seemed relatively clear and straightforward. "Behold," it said, "in the day that Aldur's Orb burns hot with crimson fire shall the name of the Child of Dark be revealed. Guard well the son of the Child of Light for he shall have no brother. And it shall come to pass that those which once were one and now are two shall be rejoined, and in that rejoining shall one of them be no more."
    The Orb had turned crimson, and the name of the Child of Dark -Zandramas- had been revealed. That matched what had taken place. The information that the son of the Child of Light -his son- would have no brother had concerned Garion a bit. At first he had taken it to mean that he and Ce'Nedra would only have one child, but the more he thought about that, the more he realized that his reasoning there was flawed. All it really said was that they would only have one son. It said nothing about daughters. The more he thought about it, the more the notion of a whole cluster of chattering little girls gathered about his knee appealed to him.
    The last passage,