Queen of Sorcery

replied.
    "Oh? In what way?" Garion said it carefully, hoping that his friend had finally decided to tell Mister Wolf everything.
    "I saw only Mimbre's oppression of Asturia. I never saw our own oppression of our own people."
    "I've been trying to tell you that," Garion pointed out. "What made you see it finally?"
    "That village where we stayed last night," Lelldorin explained. "I've never seen so poor and mean a place - or people crushed into such hopeless misery. How can they bear it?"
    "Do they have any choice?"
    "My father at least looks after the people on his land," the young man asserted defensively. "No one goes hungry or without shelter - but those people are treated worse than animals. I've always been proud of my station, but now it makes me ashamed." Tears actually stood in his eyes.
    Garion was not sure how to deal with his friend's sudden awakening. On the one hand, he was glad that Lelldorin had finally seen what had always been obvious; but on the other, he was more than a little afraid of what this newfound perception might cause his mercurial companion to leap into.
    "I'll renounce my rank," Lelldorin declared suddenly, as if he had been listening to Garion's thoughts, "and when I return from this quest, I'll go among the serfs and share their lives - their sorrows."
    "What good will that do? How would your suffering in any way make theirs less?"
    Lelldorin looked up sharply, a half dozen emotions chasing each other across his open face. Finally he smiled, but there was a determination in his blue eyes. "You're right, of course," he said. "You always are. It's amazing how you can always see directly to the heart of a problem, Garion."
    "Just what have you got in mind?" Garion asked a little apprehensively.
    "I'll lead them in revolt. I'll sweep across Arendia with an army of serfs at my back." His voice rang as his imagination fired with the idea.
    Garion groaned. "Why is that always your answer to everything, Lelldorin?" he demanded. "In the first place, the serfs don't have any weapons and they don't know how to fight. No matter how hard you talk, you'd never get them to follow you. In the second place, if they did, every nobleman in Arendia would join ranks against you. They'd butcher your army; and afterward, things would be ten times worse. In the third place, you'd just be starting another civil war; and that's exactly what the Murgos want."
    Lelldorin blinked several times as Garion's words sank in. His face gradually grew mournful again. "I hadn't thought of that," he confessed.
    "I didn't think you had. You're going to keep making these mistakes as long as you keep carrying your brain in the same scabbard with your sword, Lelldorin."
    Lelldorin hushed at that, and then he laughed ruefully. "That's a pointed way of putting it, Garion," he said reproachfully.
    "I'm sorry," Garion apologized quickly. "Maybe I should have said it another way."
    "No," Lelldorin told him. "I'm an Arend. I tend to miss things if they aren't said directly."
    "It's not that you're stupid, Lelldorin," Garion protested. "That's a mistake everyone makes. Arends aren't stupid - they're just impulsive."
    "All this was more than just impulsiveness," Lelldorin insisted sadly, gesturing out at the damp moss lying under the trees.
    "This what?" Garion asked, looking around.
    "This is the last stretch of forest before we come out on the plains of central Arendia," Lelldorin explained. "It's the natural boundary between Mimbre and Asturia."
    "The woods look the same as all the rest," Garion observed, looking around.
    "Not really," Lelldorin said somberly. "This was the favorite ground for ambush. The floor of this forest is carpeted with old bones. Look there." He pointed.
    At first it seemed to Garion that what his friend indicated was merely a pair of twisted sticks protruding from the moss with the twigs at their ends entangled in a scrubby bush. Then, with revulsion, he realized that they were the greenish bones of a human arm, the fingers clutched at the bush in a last convulsive agony. Outraged, he demanded, "Why didn't they bury him?"
    "It would take a thousand men a thousand years to gather all the bones that lie here and commit them to earth," Lelldorin intoned morbidly. "Whole generations of Arendia rest here - Mimbrate, Wacite, Asturian. All lie where they fell, and the moss blankets their endless slumber."
    Garion shuddered and pulled his eyes away from the mute appeal of that lone arm rising from the sea of moss