And he started up the hill, moving quite rapidly but making absolutely no sound as he went. Garion floundered along behind him, his feet cracking the dead twigs underfoot embarrassingly until he began to catch the secret of it. Silk nodded approvingly once, but said nothing.
The trees ended just at the crest of the hill, and Silk stopped there. The valley below with the dark road passing through it was empty except for two deer who had come out of the woods on the far side to graze in the frosty grass.
"We'll wait a while," Silk said. "If Brill and his hireling are following, they shouldn't be far behind."
He sat on a stump and watched the empty valley.
After a while, a cart moved slowly along the road toward Winold. It looked tiny in the distance, and its pace along the scar of the road seemed very slow.
The sun rose a bit higher, and they squinted into its full morning brightness.
"Silk," Garion said finally in a hesitant tone.
"Yes, Garion?"
"What's this all about?" It was a bold question to ask, but Garion felt he knew Silk well enough now to ask it.
"All what?"
"What we're doing. I've heard a few things and guessed a few more, but it doesn't really make any sense to me."
"And just what have you guessed, Garion?" Silk asked, his small eyes very bright in his unshaven face.
"Something's been stolen-something very important - and Mister Wolf and Aunt Pol - and the rest of us - are trying to get it back."
"All right," Silk said. "That much is true."
"Mister Wolf and Aunt Pol are not at all what they seem to be," Garion went on.
"No," Silk agreed, "they aren't."
"I think they can do things that other people can't do," Garion said, struggling with the words. "Mister Wolf can follow this thing - whatever it is - without seeing it. And last week in those woods when the Murgos passed, they did something - I don't even know how to describe it, but it was almost as if they reached out and put my mind to sleep. How did they do that? And why?"
Silk chuckled.
"You're a very observant lad," he said. Then his tone became more serious. "We're living in momentous times, Garion. The events of a thousand years and more have all focused on these very days. The world, I'm told, is like that. Centuries pass when nothing happens, and then in a few short years events of such tremendous importance take place that the world is never the same again."
"I think that if I had my choice, I'd prefer one of those quiet centuries," Garion said glumly.
"Oh, no," Silk said, his lips drawing back in a ferretlike grin. "Now's the time to be alive - to see it all happen, to be a part of it. That makes the blood race, and each breath is an adventure."
Garion let that pass.
"What is this thing we're following?" he asked.
"It's best if you don't even know its name," Silk told him seriously, "or the name of the one who stole it. There are people trying to stop us; and what you don't know, you can't reveal."
"I'm not in the habit of talking to Murgos," Garion said stiffly.
"It's not necessary to talk to them," Silk said. "There are some among them who can reach out and pick the thoughts right out of your mind."
"That isn't possible," Garion said.
"Who's to say what's possible and what isn't?" Silk asked. And Garion remembered a conversation he had once had with Mister Wolf about the possible and the impossible.
Silk sat on the stump in the newly risen sun looking thoughtfully down into the still-shadowy valley, an ordinary-looking little man in ordinary-looking tunic and hose and a rough brown shoulder cape with its hood turned up over his head.
"You were raised as a Sendar, Garion," he said, "and Sendars are solid, practical men with little patience for such things as sorcery and magic and other things that can't be seen or touched. Your friend, Durnik, is a perfect Sendar. He can mend a shoe or fix a broken wheel or dose a sick horse, but I doubt that he could bring himself to believe in the tiniest bit of magic."
"I am a Sendar," Garion objected. The hint implicit in Silk's observation struck at the very center of his sense of his own identity.
Silk turned and looked at him closely.
"No," he said, "you aren't. I know a Sendar when I see one just as I can recognize the difference between an Arend and a Tolnedran or a Cherek and an Algar. There's a certain set of the head, a certain look about the eyes of Sendars that you don't have. You're not a Sendar."
"What am I then?" Garion challenged.
"I don't know," Silk said with a puzzled frown, "and that's very unusual, since I've been trained to know what people are. It may come to me in time, though."
"Is Aunt Pol a Sendar?" Garion asked.
"Of course not." Silk laughed.
"That explains it then," Garion said. "I'm probably the same thing she is."
Silk looked sharply at him.
"She's my father's sister, after all," Garion said. "At first I thought it was my mother she was related to, but that was wrong. It was my father; I know that now."
"That's impossible," Silk said flatly.
"Impossible?"
"Absolutely out of the question. The whole notion's unthinkable."
"Why?"
Silk chewed at his lower lip for a moment. "Let's go back to the wagons," he said shortly.
They turned and went down through the dark trees with the bright morning sunlight slanting on their backs in the frosty air.
They rode the back lanes for the rest of the day. Late in the afternoon when the sun had begun to drop into a purple bank of clouds toward the west, they arrived at the farm where they were to pick up Mingan's hams. Silk spoke with the stout farmer and showed him the piece of parchment Mingan had given them in Darine.
"I'll be glad to get rid of them," the farmer said. "They've been occupying storage space I sorely need."
"That's frequently the case when one has dealings with Tolnedrans," Silk observed. "They're gifted at getting a bit more than they pay foreven if it's only the free use of someone else's storage sheds."
The farmer glumly agreed.
"I wonder," Silk said as if the thought had just occurred to him, "I wonder if you might have seen a friend of mine - Brill by name? A medium-sized man with black hair and beard and a cast to one eye?"
"Patched clothes and a sour disposition?" the stout farmer asked.