Her eyes filled. Her lower lip trembled. "You don't love me any more," she accused him in a quavering little voice.

Garion groaned even in his sleep. It always came down to that. She won every single argument with that artful bit of deception. He knew it was not genuine. He knew that she only did it to get her own way, but he was absolutely defenseless against it. It might have nothing whatsoever to do with the matter under discussion, but she always managed to twist things around until she could unleash that devastating accusation, and all hope of his winning even the smallest point was immediately lost. Where had she learned to be so heartlessly dishonest?

And so it was that Garion, dressed in mail, wearing his crown and self consciously holding his flaming sword aloft, had ridden into the forts atop the eastern escarpment to the thunderous cheers of Ce'Nedra's army.

So much had happened since Garion and Silk and Belgarath had crept from the citadel at Riva the previous spring. The young king lay musing in his high, canopied bed, having almost given up on sleep. Ce'Nedra had in fact raised an army. As he had heard more of the details, he had been more and more astonished - not only by her audacity but also by the enormous amount of energy and sheer will she had expended in the process. She had been guided and assisted, certainly, but the initial concept had been hers. His admiration for her was tinged slightly with apprehension. He was going to marry a very strongminded young woman - and one who was not overly troubled by scruples.

He rolled over and punched at his pillow, hoping somehow by that familiar act to bring on more normal sleep, but once again he slipped into restless dreaming. Relg and Taiba were walking toward him, and they were holding hands!

And then he was at the Stronghold, sitting at Adara's bedside. His beautiful cousin was even paler than he remembered, and she had a persistent, racking cough. Even as the two of them talked, Aunt Pol was taking steps to remedy the last complications of the wound which had so nearly claimed the girl's life.

"I was mortified, of course," Adara was saying. "I'd taken so much care to conceal it from him, and now I'd gone and blurted it out to him, and I wasn't even dying."

"Hettar?" Garion said again. He'd already said it three times.

"If you don't stop that, Garion, I'm going to be cross with you," Adara said quite firmly.

"I'm sorry," he apologized quickly. "It's just that I've never considered him in that light. He's a good friend, but I never thought of him as particularly loveable. He's so - I don't know - implacable, I suppose."

"I have certain reasons to believe that may change," Adara said with a faint blush. Then she began to cough again.