Magician's Gambit

comfort of the old man's companionship. It was not only that, however. Ce'Nedra was riding demurely with Aunt Pol just ahead, and Garion felt very strongly that he should keep an eye on her.
    Mister Wolf rode in silence, looking cross and irritable, and he frequently dug his fingers under the splint on his left arm.
    "Leave it alone, father," Aunt Pol told him without turning around.
    "It itches."
    "That's because it's healing. Just leave it alone."
    He grumbled about that under his breath.
    "Which route are you planning to take to the Vale?" she asked him.
    "We'll go around by way of Tol Rane," he replied.
    "The season's moving on, father," she reminded him. "If we take too long, we'll run into bad weather in the mountains."
    "I know that, Pol. Would you rather cut straight across Maragor?"
    "Don't be absurd."
    "Is Maragor really all that dangerous?" Garion asked.
    Princess Ce'Nedra turned in her saddle and gave him a withering look. "Don't you know anything?" she asked him with towering superiority.
    Garion drew himself up, a dozen suitable responses to that coming to mind almost at once.
    Mister Wolf shook his head warningly. "Just let it pass," the old man told him. "It's much too early to start in on that just now."
    Garion clenched his teeth together.
    They rode for an hour or more through the cool morning, and Garion gradually felt his temper improving. Then Hettar rode up to speak with Mister Wolf. "There are some riders coming," he reported.
    "How many?" Wolf asked quickly.
    "A dozen or more - coming in from the west."
    "They could be Tolnedrans."
    "I'll see," Aunt Pol murmured. She lifted her face and closed her eyes for a moment. "No," she said. "Not Tolnedrans. Murgos."
    Hettar's eyes went flat. "Do we fight?" he asked with a dreadful kind of eagerness, his hand going to his sabre.
    "No," Wolf replied curtly. "We hide."
    "There aren't really that many of them."
    "Never mind, Hettar," Wolf told him. "Silk," he called ahead, "there are some Murgos coming toward us from the west. Warn the others and find us all a place to hide."
    Silk nodded curtly and galloped forward.
    "Are there any Grolims with them?" the old man asked Aunt Pol.
    "I don't think so," she answered with a small frown. "One of them has a strange mind, but he doesn't seem to be a Grolim."
    Silk rode back quickly. "There's a thicket off to the right," he told them. "It's big enough to hide in."
    "Lets go, then," Wolf said.
    The thicket was fifty yards back among the larger trees. It appeared to be a patch of dense brush surrounding a small hollow. The ground in the hollow was marshy, and there was a spring at its center.
    Silk had swung down from his horse and was hacking a thick bush off close to the ground with his short sword. "Take cover in here," he told them. "I'll go back and brush out our tracks." He picked up the bush and wormed his way out of the thicket.
    "Be sure the horses don't make any noise," Wolf told Hettar. Hettar nodded, but his eyes showed his disappointment.
    Garion dropped to his knees and wormed his way through the thick brush until he reached the edge of the thicket; then he sank down on the leaves covering the ground to peer out between the gnarled and stumpy trunks.
    Silk, walking backward and swing his bush, was sweeping leaves and twigs from the forest floor over the tracks they had made from the trail to the thicket. He was moving quickly, but was careful to obliterate their trail completely.
    From behind them, Garion heard a faint snap and rustle in the leaves, and Ce'Nedra crawled up and sank to the ground at his side. "You shouldn't be this close to the edge of the brush," he told her in a low voice.
    "Neither should you," she retorted.
    He let that pass. The princess had a warm, flowerlike smell; for some reason, that made Garion very nervous.
    "How far away do you think they are?" she whispered.
    "How would I know?"
    "You're a sorcerer, aren't you?"
    "I'm not that good at it."
    Silk finished brushing away the tracks and stood for a moment studying the ground as he looked for any trace of their passage he might have missed. Then he burrowed his way into the thicket and crouched down a few yards from Garion and Ce'Nedra.
    "Lord Hettar wanted to fight them," Ce'Nedra whispered to Garion. "Hettar always wants to fight when he sees Murgos."
    "The Murgos killed his parents when he was very young. He had to watch while they did it."
    She gasped. "How awful!"
    "If you children don't mind," Silk said sarcastically,