“What exactly are you up to, Old Wolf?” she asked him, but her eyes had an amused look in them.
“Do I have to be up to something?”
“You usually are, father.”
She did, however, fetch four crystal goblets and a decanter of fine old Tolnedran wine.
“The four of us started all this together quite a long time ago,” Belgarath recalled. “Perhaps, before we all separate, we should take a moment to remember that we’ve come a long way since then, and some rather strange things have happened to us. We’ve all changed in one way or another, I think.”
“You haven’t changed all that much, father,” Aunt Pol said meaningfully. “Would you get to the point?”
Belgarath’s eyes were twinkling openly now with some huge, suppressed mirth.
“Durnik has something for you,” he said.
Durnik swallowed hard. “Now?” he asked Belgarath apprehensively. Belgarath nodded.
“I know how much you love beautiful things—like that bird over there,” Durnik said to Aunt Pol, looking at the crystal wren Garion had given her the previous year. “I wanted to give you something like that, too—only I can’t work in glass or in gemstones. I’m a metalsmith, so I have to work in steel.” He had been unwrapping something covered in plain cloth. What he produced finally was an intricately wrought steel rose, just beginning to open. The details were exquisite, and the flower glowed with a burnished life of its own.
“Why, Durnik,” Aunt Pol said, genuinely pleased. “How very lovely.”
Durnik, however, did not give her the rose yet. “It has no color, though,” he noted a bit critically, “and no fragrance.” He glanced nervously at Belgarath.
“Do it,” the old man told him. “The way I showed you.”
Durnik turned back to Aunt Pol, still holding the burnished rose in his hand. “I really have nothing to give you, my Pol,” he told her humbly, “except an honest heart—and this.” He held out the rose in his hand, and his face took on an expression of intense concentration.
Garion heard it very clearly. It was a familiar, rushing surge of whispered sound, filled with a peculiarly bell-like shimmer. The polished rose in Durnik’s outstretched hand seemed to pulsate slightly, and then gradually it began to change. The outsides of the petals were as white as new snow, but the insides, where the flower was just opening, were a deep, blushing red. When Durnik finished, he held a living flower out to Aunt Pol, its petals beaded with dew.
Aunt Pol gasped as she stared incredulously at the rose. It was unlike any flower that had ever existed. With a trembling hand she took it from him, her eyes filled with sudden tears. “How is it possible?” she asked in an awed voice.
“Durnik’s a very special man now,” Belgarath told her. “So far as I know, he’s the only man who ever died and then lived again. That could not help changing him—at least a little. But then, I suspect that there’s always been a poet lurking under the surface of our good, practical friend. Maybe the only real difference is that now he has a way of letting that poet out.”
Durnik, looking just a bit embarrassed, touched the rose with a tentative finger. “It does have one advantage, my Pol,” he noted. “The steel is still in it, so it will never fade or wilt. It will stay just as it is now. Even in the middle of winter, you’ll have at least one flower.”
“Oh, Durnik!” she cried, embracing him.
Durnik looked a bit abashed as he awkwardly returned her embrace. “If you really like it, I could make you some others,” he told her. “A whole garden of them, I suppose. It’s not really all that hard, once you get the hang of it.”
Aunt Pol’s eyes, however, had suddenly widened. With one arm still about Durnik, she turned slightly to look at the crystal wren perched upon its glass twig. “Fly,” she said, and the glowing bird spread its wings and flew to her outstretched hand. Curiously it inspected the rose, dipped its beak into a dew drop, and then it lifted its head and began to sing a trilling little song. Gently Aunt Pol raised her hand aloft, and the crystal bird soared back to its glass twig. The echo of its song still hung in the silent air.
“I expect it’s time for Garion and me to be going,” Belgarath said, his face rather sentimental and misty.
Aunt Pol, however, had quite obviously realized something. Her eyes narrowed slightly, then went very wide. “Just a moment, Old Wolf,” she said to Belgarath with a faint hint of steel in her voice. “You knew about this from the very beginning, didn’t you?”
“About what, Pol?” he asked innocently.
“That Durnik—that I—” For the first time in his life Garion saw her at a loss for words. “You knew!” she flared.
“Naturally. As soon as Durnik woke up, I could feel something different in him. I’m surprised you didn’t feel it yourself. I had to work with him a bit to bring it out, though.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask, Pol.”
“You—I—” With an enormous effort she gained control of herself. “All of these months you let me go on thinking that my power was gone, and it was there all the time! It was still there, and you put me through all of that?”
“Oh, really, Pol. If you’d just stopped to think, you’d have realized that you can’t give it up like that. Once it’s there, it’s there.”
“But our Master said—”
Belgarath raised one hand. “If you’ll just stop and remember, Pol, all he really asked was if you’d be willing to limit your independence in marriage and go through life with no more power than Durnik has. Since there’s no way he could remove your power, he obviously had something else in mind.”
“You let me believe—”
“I have no control over what you believe, Pol,” he replied in his most reasonable tone of voice.
“You tricked me!”
“No, Pol,” he corrected, “you tricked yourself.” Then he smiled fondly at her. “Now, before you go off into a tirade, think about it for a moment. All things considered, it didn’t really hurt you, did it? And isn’t it really nicer to find out about it this way?” His smile became a grin. “You can even consider it my wedding present to you, if you’d like,” he added.
She stared at him for a moment, obviously wanting to be cross about the whole thing, but the look he returned her was impish. The confrontation between them had been obscure, but he had quite obviously won this time. Finally, no longer able to maintain even the fiction of anger, she laughed helplessly and put her hand affectionately on his arm. “You’re a dreadful old man, father,” she told him.
“I know,” he admitted. “Coming, Garion?”
Once they were in the hall outside, Belgarath began to chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” Garion asked him.
“I’ve been waiting for that moment for months,” his grandfather said, still chortling. “Did you see her face when she finally realized what had happened? She’s been moping around with that look of noble self sacrifice for all this time, and then she suddenly finds out that it was absolutely unnecessary.” His face took on a wicked little smirk. “Your Aunt’s always been just a little too sure of herself, you know. Maybe it was good for her to go for a little while thinking that she was just an ordinary person. It might give her some perspective.”
“She was right.” Garion laughed. “You are a dreadful old man.”
Belgarath grinned. “One does one’s best.”
They went along the hallway to the royal apartment where the clothes Garion was to wear for his wedding were already laid out. “Grandfather,” Garion said, sitting down to pull off his boots, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Just before Torak died, he called out to his mother.”
Belgarath, tankard in hand, nodded.
“Who is his mother?”
“The universe,” the old man replied.
“I don’t understand.”