King of The Murgos

farmlands," Silk replied lightly. "Garion saw to it that they won't be needing horses any more."
    "Oh," Durnik said. He thought about it for a moment. "Good," he said finally.
    The dark trees loomed out of the fog as the company approached the edge of the forest. The leaves had turned brown and clung sparsely to the branches, for winter was not far off. As they rode in under the twisted branches, Garion looked about, trying to identify the trees, but they were of kinds that he did not recognize. They were gnarled into fantastic shapes, and their limbs seemed almost to writhe up and out from their massy trunks, reaching toward the sunless sky. Their gnarled stems were dotted with dark knots, deeply indented in the coarse bark, and those knots seemed somehow to give each tree a grotesque semblance of a distorted human face with wide, staring eyes and a gaping mouth twisted into an expression of unspeakable horror. The forest floor was deep with fallen leaves, blackened and sodden, and the fog hung gray beneath the branches spreading above.
    Ce'Nedra drew her cloak more tightly about her and shuddered. "Do we have to go through this forest?" she asked plaintively.
    "I thought you liked trees," Garion said.
    "Not these." She looked about fearfully. "There's something very cruel about them. They hate each other."
    "Hate? Trees?"
    "They struggle and push each other, trying to reach the sunlight. I don't like this place, Garion."
    "Try not to think about it," he advised.
    They pushed deeper and deeper into the gloomy wood, riding in silence for the most part, their spirits sunk low by the pervasive gloom and by the cold antagonism seeping from the strange, twisted trees.
    They took a brief, cold lunch, then rode on toward a somber twilight which seemed hardly more than a deepening of the foggy half-dark spread beneath the hateful trees.
    "I guess we've gone far enough," Belgarath said finally. "Let's get a fire going and put up the tents."
    It might have been only Garion's imagination or perhaps the cry of some hunting bird of prey, but as the first few flickering tongues of flame curled up around the sticks in the fire pit, it seemed that he heard a shriek coming from the trees themselves—a shriek of fear mingled with a dreadful rage. And as he looked around, the distorted semblances of human faces deeply indented in the surrounding tree trunks seemed to move in the flickering light, silently howling at the hated fire.
    After they had eaten, Garion walked away from the fire. He still felt strangely numb inside, as if his emotions had been enclosed in some kind of protective blanket. He found that he could no longer even remember the details of last night's encounter, but only brief, vivid flashes of blood spurting in ruddy torchlight, of riders tumbling limply out of their saddles, and of the torch bearer's head flying off into the fog.
    "Do you want to talk about it?" Belgarath asked quietly from just behind him.
    "Not really, Grandfather. I don't think you'll approve of what I did, so why don't we just let it go at that? There's no way that I could make you understand."
    "Oh, I understand, Garion. I just don't think that you accomplished anything, that's all. You killed—how many was it?"
    "Eight."
    "That many? All right—eight Malloreans. What did you prove by it?"
    "I wasn't really out to prove anything, Grandfather. I just wanted to make sure that they never did it again. I can't even be absolutely certain that they were the men who killed those Murgo farmers. They did kill some people someplace, though, and people who do that sort of thing need to be stopped."
    "You did that, all right. Does it make you feel any better?"
    "No. I suppose not. I wasn't even angry when I killed them. It was just something that had to be done, so I did it. Now it's over, and I'd just as soon forget about it."
    Belgarath gave him a long, steady look. "All right," he said finally. "As long as you keep that firmly in mind, I guess you haven't done yourself any permanent injury. Let's go back to the fire. It's chilly out here in the woods."
    Garion slept badly that night, and Ce'Nedra, huddled almost fearfully in his arms, stirred restlessly and often whimpered in her sleep.
    The next morning, Belgarath rose and looked about with a dark scowl. "This is absurd," he burst out quite suddenly. "Where is the sun?"
    "Behind the clouds and fog, father," Polgara replied as she calmly brushed her long, dark hair.
    "I know that, Pol," he retorted